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| Rupam Banerjee |
It’s the peak hour on a weekend
evening at a multinational fast food outlet in the City Centre in Rajarhat.
There is such a huge rush that people have queued up outside the glistening
doors of the popular joint. Employees are under a tremendous pressure as
customers are getting impatient at yet-to-be cleared tables. Quite unmoved, one
of the customer service team members, is totally engrossed in his job. Sprightly
as he is, the 20 something employee, cleans up the mess fast—even the extremely
noisy ambience can’t affect his concentration.
That this smiling team member is
exceptional—and is differently-abled—becomes obvious when a customer asks the
price of an item. He smartly informs the cost through his fluent hand-and-body
gesture that can be understood by anybody. Meet the vivacious, and one of the
most popular customer service members of the store, Rupam Banerjee. This
Sodepur-based worker’s speaking and hearing disability couldn’t stop him from
working in a job which needs constant interaction with customers.
“He wasn’t like this from birth” says Rupam’s
mother Soma Banerjee. “When he was two years old, during the Diwali, I’d first
notice that Rupam is not responding to the loudening burst of crackers”. This
observation lead to a series of medical tests until the Banerjees learned that
their son is unable to hear. It turned out that, on an earlier occasion, when a
doctor prescribed an antibiotic to treat his ear infection, the high dose of
the drug had mistakenly damaged his internal auditory nerves. Crestfallen,
Rupam’s parents had to admit Rupam to the The Regional Centre of Ali Yavar Jung
National Institute of Hearing Handicapped at Bonhooghly, at the age of four.
Being a diligent student, he acquired sign language very fast. And after 18
years of education, he joined ‘Silence’, a Kolkata-based non-governmental
organisation, to get a special training. The six-month training program helped
Rupam gain entry to the multinational fast food joint. “We never expected that
Rupam will get a job and earn such a handsome amount,” said Rupam’s uncle
Pranab Kar. “He is a living testimony what hard work and passion can achieve,
notwithstanding any sort of obstacle.”
Kar recalled an anecdote after
Rupam joined his new job. “We’d visited Siliguri to his sister’s home to attend
a wedding ceremony. We returned home after having spent two sleepless nights
there. Even though rest of us were dog tired looking for some rest, Rupam
didn’t miss his night shift work at the joint.” Such is his dedication that his
boss recently remarked that Rupam is capable of handling workload of 10 people.
Deafness or hearing impairment
occurs due to various reasons. If someone is hard of hearing from early
childhood, he or she becomes speech impaired by default because a child picks
up a language after she gets to hear other people speaking. When an infant
babbles, it is nothing but his or her experiment with language acquisition. “If
she fails to hear anything, naturally she can’t perform the basic experiment of
communication,” said Samir Ray, the former director of All India Federation of
Deaf (Delhi) and one of the founders of ‘Silence’.
According to Ray, if these people
are trained properly they can do almost anything. Especially they are very good
at doing ‘repetitive works,’ such as designing jewellery or data entry in any
office. More or less, most jobs tend to
be drudgery to most so-called able-bodied people but not for the ‘disabled. ‘A normal person, who is equipped with basic
linguistics, speaks or writes using his or her linguistic reflex. But these
people work or write with the help of visual reflex and that is why they are
faster and more accurate, doing repetitive works,” added Ray. This is why these
people are now aptly called ‘differently-abled’. “Even in the corporate world,
these people have plenty of chances to work and perform better than others,” he
adds.
The same view is shared by the
Vice Chancellor of West Bengal State University, Prof. Ashoke Ranjan Thakur,
who believes these people should be added to the mainstream of the society for
better results in all walks of life. He says, “Their advantage is that, while
working, they don’t hear anything. Naturally they don’t get distracted easily
and the final output of the job is always better.” Among the six non-teaching
employees at Barasat State University, three of them are verbally challenged.
Prof Thakur thinks that isolation or social ostracization deteriorates their disability.
“One should never forget that they have a unique diligence. They don’t need
charity”.
Suman Mukherjee, Srila Mukherjee
and Mital Sarkar-- three deaf-mute employees of Barasat State University are
now happy citizens of India. Just like Rupam’s parents, their near and dear
ones never thought they would work and contribute to the society some day. And
now they are not only working, but performing better than the rest. Even Suman
and Srila recently got married. And Rupam also has a soft corner for a girl he
met at his elder sister’s weddding. However marriage is not a priority for
21-year old Rupam, “I’m not thinking of marriage now, and my work is everything
for me at the moment. My next goal is to be wealthy and famous”, he says shyly
in a passionate ‘voice’ of sign language.
