Taken from Times of India.
CHENNAI: In the relatively quiet 'news monitoring' corner of the 3-month old Tamil TV channel, News 7, sits a young man absorbed in the screen before him. Ears enclosed by a pair of stereo Sennheiser earphones, 22-year-old Arun Bose monitors Sun TV, marking an hourly update of the channel's newscast on an Excel sheet. Ask him what's trending today and he says Sri Lankan's president Maithripala Sirisena's Delhi visit and the fuel price rise. Four other young men sit around Bose, monitoring the news, but while they have their eyes glued to their screens, Bose has his ears tuned in, for he is partially blind.
About two months ago, Bose was recommended for the job of news monitor by Karna Vidhya Technology Centre (KVTC), a training-cum placement institute at Guindy that teaches visually challenged persons to work with computers and internet technology to improve their career prospects. Having mastered office automation there, he interviewed with News 7 and copped the job, working an 8-hour shift there.
Bose, a graduate of Malayalam Literature, from Kerala, has lived in Chennai for a year is pleased with this, his first career break. At the News 7 office, amid the high-decibel whirr of TV cameras and crackling airwaves Bose and his four colleagues are tasked with monitoring three Tamil news channels outside
their own: Sun TV, Thanthi TV and Puthiya Thalaimurai. "I have to check for breaking news, frequency of repeats, number of exclusives and special stories," says Bose, who relies on the screen reading software JAWS to file his reports.
His boss, editor-in-chief Rajesh Sundaram, says Bose stands for the kind of inclusive workspace the young News 7 wishes to build. "Bose is on par with his colleagues, and we've made no special concessions for him," says Sundaram, who plans to continue hiring persons with disabilities.
Once he clocks out, Bose, who lives in a mansion at Choolaimedu, says he usually returns to his room to surf the internet and listen to music. Only two months into the job he says he hasn't yet decided if he wants to make his future in media. "Perhaps banking because it's secure," says Bose, drawing attention
to the narrow expectations both the visually impaired and recruiters have come to form about career choices.
K Raghuraman, professor of English Literature at Government Arts and Science College, Nandanam, and coordinator at KVTC says he isn't aware of another visually challenged person hired at a TV channel in Tamil Nadu. "We want to prove that almost every sector can accommodate the visually impaired provided their workspaces are accessible," he says, "We want to step beyond the traditional sectors of employment for the blind, like teaching and banking, and want to break new ground in IT and the media." Surrounded by breaking news in the newsroom and helping track it, Bose, knowingly or not, is doing just that.
Source: Times of India.
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