Bihar : He's blind, yet a guiding light for many

Shailesh Nath Sinha is visually challenged but, the fighter that he is, he has not allowed his handicap to kill his spirit.Since January 1994, he has been running a school — the Doon Public School — in an obscure lane at Shastrinagar in Gaya town.Today, he and 23 other teachers teach the 426 children who are on its rolls. Incidentally, Sinha was not born blind. He was five years old when he lost sight in one eye because of detachment of its retina.“Since I was still a child, I could not understand what had happened to me. However, I was enthusiastic about studies and continued to do well,” Sinha said.Misfortune, however, did not leave him alone for long. When he was studying for his undergraduate examinations, he lost sight in his healthy eye, too, when its retina also detached. In a matter of days, his world had turned completely dark.For some time, he had no option but to continue to depend on his father, a Bihar government employee.He spent the whole of 1985 consulting one ophthalmologist after another, hoping all the while that he would somehow recover his eyesight. When he realised that no such miracle was going to take place, at least in his case, he again turned to education for survival.“I worked as a stenographer with the State Bank of India (SBI) at Delhi for a while but I quit after 16 days. I had realised that I was not cut out to be a stenographer,” Sinha said. He finally decided to set up a school.Doon Public High School opened on January 4, 1994, the birth anniversary of Louis Braille. “Those early days were days of hardship as I had only three students to teach. I was an object of ridicule at the time because people could not believe that a blind man could teach anybody, least of all children who had to be taught from scratch,” he said, adding that, with time, the situation improved as people’s confidence in his ability to teach grew.