Everyone laughed, don’t forget.
At Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent meeting with a roomful of engineering students, a young woman was explaining an app for dyslexia when he interrupted with: “Will this help 40- or 50-year-old men?” Much amusement followed, and she said, “Yes”. He continued, “That will make their mothers happy!”
Still more amusement. Almost more than the prime minister’s allusion to his favourite political punching bag, the laughter was what disturbed me. I mean, if you were watching this exchange while being fully and intimately aware of what dyslexia is, how would you react?
Well fine, I wasn’t in that audience. But there is someone in my family, about to finish school now, who has had dyslexia. Yes, I know it is by no stretch a dread disease like leprosy and smallpox used to be. It is essentially a learning disability, and there are now all kinds of strategies to help dyslexics learn and live (though attitudes like Modi’s serve as stumbling blocks).
There are developmental paediatricians who know how to diagnose dyslexia early and can recommend remedial techniques to use at home. There are teachers who get trained in special educational methods aimed at dyslexic children. There are schools staffed with such teachers and exam rules that accommodate the needs of such children.
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Using all this, dyslexic children can grow up to live lives every bit as productive and fulfilling as anyone else – maybe even more so. Think of names like Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. But it’s not just famous names. As you make your way through your day, the numbers say that about every tenth person you pass, or smile at, or exchange that high-five with or perhaps even share a home with, could have dyslexia and may have found ways to live with it.
But make no mistake, getting there is no walk in the park. That person I mentioned, and all of us in the family, know exactly what dyslexia has meant over the last several years.
Reading has always been a chore. New words have to be picked up a letter at a time – a process which seems to introduce ghost letters every now and then just to confuse the issue. Even words seen many times before can suddenly turn opaque. This kind of localised struggle makes the job of parsing whole sentences that much more difficult, because the effort of understanding individual words often seems to undermine the ongoing understanding of the sentence. How do you reconcile this endless battle with the constant and easy joy other family members find in reading? If you had a spare couple of hours, why would you ever choose to spend them reading?
Arithmetic never seems to make sense. What is this business of borrowing from the next digit over, and why, even though it looks the same when written, is it different from carrying a digit? Why are fractions sometimes written with a horizontal line and sometimes with a slash and what is that decimal point thing, anyway? Why does six million have six zeros, but 6.5 million has only five, and does that difference have something to do with the numbers six and 6.5?
Schoolwork and preparing for exams have forever meant long, frustrating hours with an increasingly impatient adult relative in attendance. Simply focusing on the task at hand is hard enough. But this large and possibly overbearing presence in the adjacent chair compounds that difficulty. So you find yourself grabbing at whatever word or number is nearest in the hope that that’s the answer, watching the face in the adjacent chair for clues and approval. Or worse, disapproval.
And finally, in such circumstances, patience runs short all round. I’ve found my voice rising, for example, in tandem with the unreasonable urge to say something pointed and hurtful. I’ve struggled to understand how anyone – let alone this otherwise articulate and spirited little person – can fail to grasp basic themes around numbers and words.
There’s all this to take on and conquer, with dyslexia. Today, this person close to me has found ways to deal with it and believes it is now a thing of the past. Yet, we know only too well how it has been at times an emotional wrench, often a struggle and always a challenge.
Dyslexia was all those things for us, yes, and yet this person never complained or shrank from the challenge – which is why it is a thing of the past. But here’s what dyslexia never was: a joke to be snickered at, a label to stick on someone we didn’t like.
To watch my prime minister treat it that way, then, is nauseating.
And to watch a room filled with young students guffaw and applaud this man’s insensitivity is worse than nauseating. It filled me with despair.
Dilip D‘Souza is a writer based in Bombay.
