Disability and jugad

 

Yesterday was the International disability day. It’s a day to remember and perhaps celebrate disability. In India, like many other things, disability runs on the jugad system. When people get disabled, their life has to be lived as if the country is incapacitated to look after them. As if people do not have time for them. As if a man who needs a wheelchair has to run his life on a pair of crutches. And most importantly keep smiling. Because the others who are fit want them to do it.

Today I was talking to a friend and we discussed why people are so unenpathetic in this world. It’s a serious research question. When I was doing my PhD, I had a mental breakdown. I had serious delusions and hallucinations. I was sick for three years, spending all the time in my room. Everybody around me knew I was sick. I stayed like that for three years spending a time which would be worse than staying holed up in a dungeon. But in those three years not a single soul came to help me out. My advisor had no time to talk to me. And I was in the best institute of this country where people sit at top business companies and government positions. There are even courses on ethics.  We discussed why this is so. And none of us had an answer.

Daniel Kanheman in his book Thinking fast and slow tries to answer these questions. There was an experiment in which a person needed immediate help and out of 20-30 people who could help him, very few turned up. I think their conclusion was that everybody felt it was someone else who would help the person out. It was not their duty. In my case no one turned up. This is not a surprise, but a norm.

Thankfully the country has good laws on Disability. But everybody knows that laws in our country could be more disabled than any other thing. Our policymakers have still not figured out how to make those laws implementable. The Mental Healthcare Act for example is good. But it needs proper implementation before the people could reap the benefits of greater independence given to the mentally ill. Till then the jugad system continues.

A disability does not mean a person is finished. Or that the person cannot achieve great feats. There are numerous examples of disabled people doing some wonderful things. Hope which is an ingredient of any success needs to be nurtured in case of disabled people. If hope dies, the person will die. Even if they live. And it is the hope of a good future which is being snatched from many disabled people. We die in the minds of people. And when that happens, the person feels it. And that punishment is greater than any other the society can give to its members.

And surprisingly, this is not limited to illiterate people. Even the most literate and successful people want to stay away from the disabled. Or only meet them at charities. Disability is connected to weakness. People could not be more wrong. It is not the weakness that holds them back, it is the social structures. A mentally ill person cannot even think of navigating the bureaucratic and complex structures of business or politics. Not because they cannot understand stuff. But because people do not want to understand them.

I am going to give you a cliche that things should change. They should always. In a direction where everyone can be happy and satisfied. In a direction where people are not forced to smile or comply but do so with their hearts open. In a direction where someone who is sick is not left to rot because people around them are busy looking after themselves. It will then be the time to celebrate the disability day with gutso.