When Madan Vasishta signs his lessons in American Sign Language to his mixed class of hearing and hearing impaired graduates at Gallaudet University, Washington DC, the students are amazed by the power of his words. Vasishta has 120 db bilateral hearing loss and “cannot hear even jet planes”.

Hailing from a village in Himachal Pradesh, he dropped out of school in sixth grade due to hearing loss after two weeks of typhoid fever and mumps. His religious family tried out a range of methods to cure his deafness, but none succeeded. “It amuses me to look back and think about how many cures I had to experience before we all finally accepted I wasn’t going to regain my hearing”, Vasishta says. Upon becoming deaf, Vasishta’s dreams of becoming a doctor were crushed. For the next nine years, he milked buffaloes, ploughed fields and studied his brother’s books. He passed Higher Secondary as a private candidate, and then, determined to educate himself further, moved to Delhi. He acquired a diploma from the Photography Institute for the Deaf, where he met a group of deaf people who eventually became his life changing connection to the deaf community, and was soon signing pay slips as Scientific Photographer at the National Physical Laboratory. He also started a night school for the adult deaf with support from the All India Federation of the Deaf (AIFD). Urged by a hearing impaired foreign visitor who the federation asked him to escort, he came to the Gallaudet University in 1967.

Despite cultural and emotional adjustments, Vasishta achieved milestones beyond comparison. He was the first student to earn three degrees from Gallaudet, the first foreign born person to get a Ph.D. degree from there, and the first hearing impaired Indian to get a Ph.D.! After serving as a teacher, principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent in schools for the deaf in Texas, Illinois, and North Carolina, he retired as superintendent of the New Mexico School for the Deaf, and currently works part time as an associate professor in the administration and supervision graduate programme at Gallaudet University, while simultaneously working on several projects in India, including authoring an Indian Sign Language dictionary, interpreting, and various educational research projects. He has written four books and scores of articles on deaf education, linguistics, sign language and administration. He is presently working on a historical fiction novel book based on Gallaudet during the 1880s, and also writing a sequel to his memoir, “Deaf in Delhi”, a story of self-propelled determination and achievement, and a fascinating look into deaf life in India. He says, “Becoming deaf pushed me to the brink to do something. If I was hearing, I would have become a doctor, just like other doctors, living an ordinary life”.

Vashishta says, “The total absence of deaf teachers, people and interpreters at the National Conference of Teachers of Deaf in Chennai was a glaring example of the vassal status the hearing give to the hearing-impaired. The government should require that all NGOs and government agencies have interpreters at their meetings and qualified deaf people be members of advisory committees. This can be done by an amendment of the 1995 Act”. He exhorts the hearing impaired to empower themselves, and to demand interpreters for communications in government offices, courts, police stations, hospitals, political assemblies, and all other places where people gather for information, concessions in SMS rates and transport charges, phone relay services and compulsory TV/movie captioning, and finally, to study, compete, get good jobs and insist on being “heard”.

I was blown away by his eloquence when I met him. I’m sure you would be too. To know more about him, you can contact him on madan (at) vasishta (d0t)net