Shubham Gupta, student with visual disability who completed his junior college from St.Xavier’s College, Mumbai has successfully scored 86% in HSC Board. Despite facing difficulties while arranging notes for his preparation, Shubham tackled all barriers and finally achieved good numbers in his board exam. Shubham says “my family expected the same number and now after getting this, they are so happy”. Shubham gave his exam from Arts stream.
While talking with him more, he revealed that apart from studies he follows cricket and also likes to play chess. While talking about his daily challenges, he shared many crucial things with us. Shubham is planing to continue his further studies from the same college and in future he wants to join civil service sector.
In conversation with Shubham Gupta :
Firstly congratulations! You scored 86% . What would you want to say about this?
It feels happy as I did my schooling from vernacular medium and my junior college was in English medium. So it was my initial struggle in coping with all subjects in English. But because of some of my good friends, my struggle with English became less and today I could score this much.
How did you prepare for your exams?
So basically I was fully confident regarding my marks in subjects like History, Political Science and Hindi. The only problem was with Economics as there were many graphs and diagrams so my classmates and even my senior friends helped me out in this. And for preparation I gave my 6 to 8 hrs daily after my prelims.
As being visually impaired, what problems did you face at academic level and in general as well?
As far as academic level is concerned, since we are dependent on Braille script, books which are available for sighted people are not available for visually impaired students and there is very less access for digital copy of those books. So we are completely dependent on other sighted classmates. But still my teachers helped me in making own notes in my script and because of this, today I could score this much.
And in general, there is constant Perspective of people regarding visually impaired person as they mostly look at us as sympathy and feels that this person is unable to do much in his life. So now it’s my aim to bring change in people’s Perspective regarding visually impaired person.
How did your college faculties contribute in your achievement?
As I mentioned earlier that my professors helped in making notes for my study material. And apart from this I would like to thank XRCVC ( Xavier’s Research Center for Visually Challenged), a department which is vehemently working for the betterment of students with visual disability. It helped me a lot as it provides all visually impaired people accessible computers through screen reading software like ‘JAWS’ ( Job Access with Speech) which reads out all textual material which is there on computer. Along with this, XRCVC has also helped me in getting writers for my exam and also provided volunteers in order to write my project as I used to provide them required materials from relevant sources.
Apart from studies, what else fascinates you?
Well, I do like to read Shakespeare’s drama and I actively follow cricket. I even play it sometimes. I also play chess as I’m looking forward to participate state level chess competition, which will be organised for visually impaired people.
So what’s your future plans? What are you looking forward to for your career?
I’m looking forward to do my majors in History and after completing my BA, I’ll start preparations for civil service examination as I want to prove that this society does not need to be only sympathetic towards differently abled people. But it needs to believe in their potential which society can witness if we are given good opportunities.