Meeting Savitri Gupta

Met Savitri Gupta today. Actually, met her first on Aditi's birthday but have only been able to find the time to write about it today. 

Savitri Gupta (38, she/ her) is a visually impaired IIT Bombay PhD fellow. We first met at the We Make Film screening in SNDT Juhu a week ago. Aditi and she exchanged numbers, and we had been in touch with her ever since. 

Around 11 am Wednesday we picked her up from her campus hostel and drove over to Powai Hiranandani hoping to find a cosy little place for a quick chat.

This is a short conversation we had in the car -

Aditi: हम Autistic हैं। हमें loud noises और शोर शराबा बिलकुल पसंद नहीं।

Savitri: ए मुझे भी बिलकुल पसंद नहीं। मुझे लगता है मैं भी थोड़ी autistic हूँ! (/lh) 

Powai has so many nice parks, but the good ones were all shut. We found this really battered garden sort of place right by a society of row houses. It had an empty bench and so we went there. The rains had made the entrance area all mucky. Aditi was leading Savitri, and it all came so instinctually to us to talk about our surroundings so Savitri would have the same information about where we were as us. 

Because agency is super important. 

Things were a bit slow to take off - turns out we're all equally shy and not very comfortable with first meetings. But the awkwardness didn't last very long at all. 

Savitri is a double orphan (a person without a living parent) born and brought up in Dadar. Blind since birth, Savitri's mother passed away when Savitri was about 2 or 3, and she doesn't quite know where her father went away after that, although she believes he passed away as well. She spent a large part of her early years living with her maternal relatives until they, too, broke contact with her. 

With help from friends and family Savitri did a Bachelor's in Social Work from Nirmala Niketan in south Mumbai. Over there she had a teacher named Anita Cherian with whose help she was able to do her projects and get her degree. For her Master's she went to TISS in Deonar. She talked at length about how inaccessible TISS was initially, and everything she had to do to get the staff and management over there to provide her the accommodations she needed. 

Since the past two years she's been pursuing a PhD from IIT Bombay. Her thesis subject is 'Citizenship access for orphans in India', and she has very recently submitted her final paper. She's now waiting to be allotted a viva slot, and during this time she's working as a research scholar at the institute, earning a stipend. 

Apparently IIT was way worse than TISS in terms of accommodations. First, she says, the campus is way bigger, making it difficult to move around. She stresses she had a lot of difficulty navigating daily life during the lockdown (and once again later when she was down with Covid during the third wave). Second - she found it very difficult to secure a guide at the beginning of her PhD owing to her disability. 

"Able-bodied mediocrity is preferred over disabled intelligence," she says. 

We finish lunch at Aroma's - by which time we're done with introductions - and come back to the IIT Campus. Savitri suggests we go to this place called Boathouse Road inside the campus. It's a long, empty stretch of tar road flanked by dense vegetation to the right and a cluster of mangroves off to the left. We figure it's best to do a walk-the-talk and so we shoot a quick sequence over there as well. 

It's a 15-minute piece where Aditi and Savitri discuss systemic ableism, disability politics, terminology, comorbidities, accessibility and agency, among other things, as Savitri holds Aditi by her arm, the both of them walking on the empty road. 

Good sequence to shoot, except it screwed up my back.

We come back to her room, and Savitri orders us some nice ginger tea. Waiting for the tea to arrive we speak about lots of other things including the movie we saw and how to make media more accessible for the visually impaired. 

Savitri tells us about a time when she wrote to Hrithik Roshan asking him to make his film Kaabil - in which he plays a visually impaired person - accessible to her through voice captions. She's also acted in a movie, which, unfortunately, never released. 

By this time we're quite exhausted, so we quickly finish our chai and leave.

The next two days we sit and go through all the footage from that day. We figure we need to necessarily incorporate three conversation points into our chats with disabled folk: 

1. Accessibility - their need for specific accommodations

2. Agency - access to information and taking charge of their narratives (autonomy)

3. Advocacy - finding allies and accessible platforms to speak about lived experiences 

So we went back today. The plan was to go to Powai Hiranandani, back to the same park. But Savitri wasn't feeling too well, so we wound up shooting in her hostel room. 

We did the 3A's. She spoke about her accessibility needs and also about accessibility overall - elevators, ramps, lifts with voices, etc. She said taking charge of your own narrative is important, and sometimes even friends and relatives deny you agency by deciding on your behalf - how long we should stay somewhere, where we should go out to eat, etc. And for advocacy she said she found a bunch of allies during her college years - including her teachers and some friends - who helped her both financially and also by equipping her to educate people about her needs. 

After our chat we shot a bunch of b-roll, for which we got her to use her laptop with JAWS on (the voice software). Also helped her fill out an employment application sent to her by Axis Bank where she's going to very soon start a part-time job. Told her about our upcoming shoot at Arpan Cafe in Juhu, and she said she wanted to come along, so we'll be taking her there this Tuesday. 

And ended the day with a plate of hot dosas and ginger chai from the hostel mess. Both were super yummy. 

More in her episode, out next Friday ✌🏾.