Inclusion is very important for children with disabilities in the primary stage like when till they’re going to primary school um because they get to uh you know socialize and learn a lot of the ground rules which are taught at that time.

But as they grow older, not all of them may be um uh inclined towards the academics and that’s the time we see that they are dropping out of mainstream school and moving on to say, special school or homeschooling in some cases.

Uh but then as they grow older, special schools, also they grow out of the special school age and they need something to bridge them into the mainstream community and also find what they are as a person, find themselves as people.

And um that was the idea with which we started AMAZE about uh 10 years ago to create a space where they can discover their abilities and interests.

They can form a social circle. And maybe some of it is just to engage them through the day, and for some of them it has led to employment.

So it is not necessarily targeted towards employment but any skill that is important in life, ranging from housekeeping to cooking to computers to art to uh you know living without their parents for a couple of days, going on camps, exploring art and music, so various things like that.

It’s very eclectic and we’ve really seen, with that kind of an approach, uh some of our trainees um have uh moved on to employable jobs in the mainstream community but most of them, because we work with the category where they have moderate uh to severe impairment, most of them have found some niche.

Like, there is one of my interns who is into cycling, and is happy to wake up every day at 4:00 AM and go cycling with a mainstream cycling group and then come back home and help his mother with the household chores and also volunteer at a small shop that they run.

So, his life is sort of set with that kind of a routine.

Have another intern who is into music and uh started pursuing that seriously.

He has finished his Trinity grade 2 and uh he is seriously practicing, he wants to really compete in Super Singer, especially after the latest thing with Karthik being there.

And so they are seriously into music.

And we have some of them who work on the farm as interns, two or three times a week.

They were really people who didn’t like being in the indoors, they found it claustrophobic and they would keep running to the, you know, sand area we had at our center or plucking leaves.

So that’s when we thought why not, you know, find a space that they feel comfortable with.

And they really like it, you know, playing with the mud, pulling out the leaves, helping in that whole cycle of sowing and harvesting and being with nature.

And there are some, like my son Nishant, who have got into art in a really serious way.

Both you know, uh digital art as well as painting and this was a kid who would not be able to write or even draw.

So um but seriously following his passion of playing with paints, it was really a sensory exploration that has over time been refined into a skill or a you know, and a craft, so to say.

So, uh to have the space that enables them to explore in all these ways, engage in different ways and really find themselves, so to say and be comfortable with their skin, however they are and that is what uh we’re looking for uh in Amaze.

And we’re hoping, there are very few centers across the nation, there is CanBridge Academy in Chennai, there is Pragati in Bangalore or we have the Yash Trust uh who runs Arpan Cafe, very famous for Arpan Cafe in Mumbai, um and we have Evoleur for example, in Delhi, run by Shalu.

So, we’re very few and far between, we need these uh sort of units to be there in every nook and corner so these young people with disab…disability have that space uh to discover themselves and find their niche in society, in community.