Launch of Third Eye Trust - Vision without Boundaries

It was a great way to start the New Year by participating in the Launch of the Third Eye Charitable Trust at the Anna centenary Library yesterday Jan 4th 2011. Kudos to Mahua Seth ,Vishnupriya Duvvru and Mohan Ganesh from the IT Industry for having taken this noble initiative with so much of commitment.

Launch of Third Eye Charitable Trust(Few moments captured):
The event started with an emotional welcome speech by Mahua Seth, Trustee with Third Eye who dedicated this trust as a Gurudakshina to her visually impaired music teacher of her school. Invocation was by Padmashri Dr.Gayathri Sankaran (visually challenged)who started with the touching “Kurai Onrum Illai song”.

This was followed with a great speech by Mr.S.S Jawahar IAS who manages the Department of Welfare for DifferentlyAbled Persons also as one of his portfolio among others. Some excerpts

• UN has advocated that the visually impaired are given complete support based on rights based approach instead of charity based.
• Employment quota with Govt is only 3 % and hence private sectors should step in to create more job opportunities for visually challenged people
• It is a paradigm shift from "Survival of the fittest" in the world to "Survival of the fastest" and the 3 factors that account for this are 1.Critical Thinking 2. Communication and 3. Collaboration. From a “Command and control “ we are moving on to a collaborative world.(In IT industry same is called moving from a Hierarchical organisation to a cloud based organisation :) )

Gandhi Kannadhasan, Proprietor, Kannadhasan Padhipagam who has been instrumental in conducting the Chennai book fair for the past 31 years promised that once we ramp up the publication to atleast 100 to 150 books we could arrange for stalls at the book fair and create more awareness and thereby get more sponsors for this noble cause.

Next was address by Shanthi Bhattacharya, Co Founder with Chetana Charitable Trust who spoke about the importance of non academic books for visually challenged.She insisted that books should actually provide an easy and pleasant means to explore the world instead of scaring them with only academic materials !

This was followed by distribution of Braille books to the visually challenged students and they were pretty excited to receive it and even started to touch and feel them once back at their seats.



What we can do for Third Eye:(Based on Vishnu Priya's inputs):

• Corporates can help provide sponsorship for the creation of the material in the various formats such as Braille, audio, e text, large print etc.
• CSR arms from Corporates across India can help distribute Third Eye's non academic materials and spread the awareness.
• Help Collaborate and introduce them to publishers who are willing to give permission to publish their list of publications in above format

Please visit their website http://www.third-eye.org/ to know more about them