When I was working on Avaz, I saw an article in the newspaper one day about a young girl who had finished school with 90% marks, had gone on to study accountancy in Ethiraj  College in Chennai, and wanted to become an Internet entrepreneur after she graduated.

This doesn’t seem unusual, except for the fact that this girl, Bhavna, spent her entire life without the ability to talk or to move. Her only method of communication was by pointing with her eyes.

Bhavna is an exceptional girl, but there are many such exceptional people in India. In our country, though, when we see a person with disabilities, we tend to think of them in terms of what they cannot do – not in terms of what they can do. We look at the wheelchair – not the person.

What Bhavna’s example proves is this: given the right opportunities, people with disabilities can show that they are capable of as much as the rest of us. When I lived abroad, I saw numerous examples of this. With the help of assistive devices, people with speech disabilities – many of them wheelchair-bound – have gone on to become music composers, nurses, college students. Stephen Hawking is one of the world’s most brilliant physicists – this, for the last 30 years, being able to move only one cheek muscle.

We built Avaz to discover the Stephen Hawkings hiding behind the silent facades of wheelchairs in India. We want to empower them by giving them the  power of communication. Because we believe what Daniel Webster once said: “If all my powers were taken from me, with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for by it I would soon regain all the rest.”

Please support our friends in the disability community regain what we all take for granted: the chance to be defined by their abilities, not by their disabilities.

All we need to do is to provide them with the right tools.

Please support our friends who need Avaz.