An MBA who conquered all odds
- by Hardeep Sembi

MUMBAI: Thirty years ago, when a visually-impaired boy called K Ramkrishna talked about his ambition of doing an MBA one day, everyone thought he was crazy.

In 1982, he earned his dream degree from the S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, becoming the first visually-challenged person in the country to do so. Today, at the age of 55, he is a general manager at IDBI.

For Ramkrishna, negative social attitudes never mattered, he took them on as a challenge instead. “I wanted people to tell me what I couldn’t do, so I could go right ahead and prove them wrong,’’ he says with a smile.

Ramkrishna, who suffered from congenital cataract at birth, began losing his vision by the age of 12, when he was forced to drop out of school. He lost four academic years “doing nothing’’ . But then two people changed his life forever.

The first was his neighbour, the “only person’ ’ who believed in Ramkrishna and egged him on to pursue his dream. Then came Rehmut Fazelbhoy from the National Association for the Blind who helped Ramkrishna re-enter school providing the necessary infrastructure . There he found his teachers and peers helpful. “I believe in give-and-take relationships. While my friends helped me with notes, I taught them mathematics,’’ he says.

But he had to work twice as hard as regular students, putting in nearly 20 hours a day while completing his MBA. One of his biggest challenges was to visualise mathematics concepts , as he could not see them or write them down. After his friends read aloud his lessons, he spent a lot of time attempting to understand concepts pictorially. Today, he teaches some of the toughest subjects in the management course at Somaiya College , where he is a part-time lecturer.

“Two things all blind people must learn are Braille and independent mobility ,’’ feels Ramkrishna, who unfortunately learnt neither. Learning Braille would have helped him make notes in college as well as during the presentations he makes for corporations.

Currently he has to memorise 70 slides while making a presentation , which is “a waste of memory’’ , according to him.

Thanks to family and friends who have always been by his side, he never learnt to move around independently. He still doesn’t need to be independently mobile as he is driven to and from work. “However, I miss going for walks by myself on the beach,” he says.Ramkrishna owes his success to his vision to be different from others and his passionate desire to do an MBA.

“People asked me why I was doing an MBA as I would probably land up as a telephone operator,’’ he laughs. Ramkrishna, however, didn’t need anybody’s approval to follow his dream