OVERCOMING HANDICAP AND SERVING A CAUSE

Wind beneath his sails

Salil Chaturvedi, the first disabled Indian to have sailed from Mumbai to Goa, believes his handicap was the best thing to have happened to him — it gave him insights into alternate ways of being and brought him close to the real universe

By PRAKRITI SINGHANIA, TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Salil Chaturvedi glides around his spacious two-bedroom house in his wheelchair, giving instructions to the cook and checking on his wife, Monika, who is in bed with a stiff neck, every half an hour. Everything around — the simple, tasteful décor of the high-ceilinged house, the lovely patch of green beyond, lined with flowers and dotted with trees, the soft folk strain by American composer Ry Cooder playing in the background — are reflective of Salil’s expansive disposition and love for all things natural. “The lawn used to be a patch of mud. We grew everything you can see now, right down to the blades of grass,” he says proudly.
The environment is very important to Salil, almost as important as breathing. “I find myself drawn to spaces of silence, which for me lie in nature. I have been working around trees lately,” he says. Last year he did a photo-exploration on “working trees” that involved people whose livelihoods revolve around trees.
But Salil is not just about the smooth and fine, he quite likes the hard life and rough outdoors. In fact, he’s the first disabled Indian to have sailed from Mumbai to Goa, which he did in eight days, and it is his dream to someday sail along the entire coastline of India. “Maybe I’ll work my way up the east coast, and finally sail into Kolkata,” he says.
Ask him how he came about the expedition and his face lights up. “Over dinner with friends one day, one of whom is a sailor, I expressed a desire to learn sailing. The sailor friend put me through to Umaji Chowgule, a Goa-based sailor, and soon I was on my way to Goa to learn sailing.” As time for the test run drew close, Chowgule told Salil he was apprehensive. To this, Salil replied, “You have experience in sailing and I have experience in being scared. So you take care of the sailing and I’ll handle the rest.”
His first sail was a breeze. “The boat was surrounded by dolphins and the sight made me feel that the sea was welcoming me with open arms,” he says. After he’d learned how to sail, he wanted to do more, and asked wife Monica and cousin Shaunik, a pilot, if they would sail with him from Mumbai to Goa. They agreed. “People close to me always refused to bring down the bar because of my disability, and that has gone a long way in making me what I am today,” he says.
Chowgule, too, was confident about the expedition and the team set sail from Mumbai on November 24 last year, arriving at Goa on December 2, 2009, the eve of World Disability Day. They were in a basic boat, which was followed by a fancier support vehicle. The eight-day long sail was the high point of Salil’s life. “It was amazing to be so far away from land, in the midst of nothingness, surrounded by water and with the starry sky above at night.’’
The sail, Salil says, brought him closer to nature. “It taught me patience and made me realise how small a part we play in nature’s scheme of things. For instance, during periods of lull, the boat would rock gently about in the sea for hours and not move an inch, and there was nothing we could do about it. It reminded me of my position in the universe.”
It was a fateful accident that left Salil crippled at the age of 16, but he belongs to that rare breed of human beings who define their own destiny and turn adversity into advantage. “My disability made me a bit of an outsider. I have always lived on the fringes, from where I have looked into the world. But this has made me insightful and sensitive to the synergies of the universe. It has also, to a large extent, shaped my decisions, goal and philosophy of life,” he says.
But Salil is done with ‘working’ the way most people do. He says he is trying to undo his social programming to realign his reason for being on this planet. “I have a bit of an anti-development stance; I don’t like what we are doing to the world, and find it difficult to reconcile my thought process to all the destruction we have caused to this planet.”
The couple even recycles their water and composts their organic waste to turn it into khad. “I am trying to find my tiny doors to the universe, under bushes and rocks, in the little nooks and crannies in nature, and I think I have already found some,” he says.


Salil sailed from Mumbai to Goa in eight days and it is his dream to someday sail along the entire coastline of India


Courtesy TOI Crest dated 30.01.2010