Dream Factory

Two intrepid adventurers have started an institute where they are making the dreams of others come true.

- Anjuly Mathai

When Sabriye Tenberken once visited a gynaecologist in Germany, where she is from, she was asked to take a genetic test. Why? Because the gynaecologist was of the opinion that since Tenberken was blind, her child could inherit her blindness, implying that blindness is a burden to society.

“Does that mean I am a burden to society?” asked Ten berken. 

“What about your mother?” asked the gynaecologist, dodging the question. “Didn’t she find it a burden raising you?”

“She’s sitting in the next room,” replied Tenberken. “Let me call her.” 

Her mother came in and bashed the gynaecologist. “If she has a blind child then she will make the child fit to society, or make society fit to the child,” said her mother. 

All her life, Tenberken has had to face prejudiced views like that of the gynaecologist. In her book, My Path Leads to Tibet, she narrates several such incidents. Times when people asked her whether her cane was a stick she used for skiing, detecting mines or whether she was a shepherd. Once, when she was in Chengdu in China, she sensed the presence of several people around her, all silently watching her. “Why are you staring at me? I’m not a panda after all,” she said, referring to the endangered species in zoos that people went out of their way to view. No one got her joke.

But she never let adversity stop her. After travelling on horseback around Tibet to find out the condition of blind children in the country, she realised that most of them were not just discriminated against but left to fester away in dark rooms because it was believed that they were possessed by demons or were suffering the consequences of some evil deed they had done in their past lives. She developed a Tibetan braille script and decided to open a school for blind children in Tibet.