A musical performance on keyboard by 17-year-old Prashanth Chandran, a youth with multiple challenges, set the tone for a function organised at the headquarters of the State Bank of Travancore (SBT) at Poojappura on Sunday to provide equipment for a school for differently abled children.
The talented teenager suffers from ventricular septal defect, a congenital heart problem, total visual impairment, and partial auditory impairment.
Notwithstanding this, Prashanth enthralled an audience which included State Bank of India (SBI) Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya, officials of the SBT and teachers and students of the Rotary Institute for Children in Need of Special Care.
After playing the tunes of over five popular film songs, Prashanth had more in store for the gathering.
Special ability
He displayed his ability to name the day on providing the date. The anchor of the programme requested the SBI chief to pose the first challenge.
Ms. Bhattacharya asked the teenager the day of her date of birth, March 18, 1956, and pat came the reply — Sunday.
The astounded crowd cheered loudly for the boy.
Inaugurating the function, Ms. Bhattacharya said each person had innate skills that had to be nurtured.
“The efforts made by teachers who train children with special needs prove to us that most complaints we make in our daily lives are unjustifiable. We have found in our company that differently abled employees, who faced several hardships, performed with greater dedication than most fully abled ones. We must continue to explore possibilities on how such persons could be integrated with the mainstream. We need to give back to society what we have gained over the years,” she said. Under the corporate social responsibility programme, the SBT handed over equipment to establish a training unit for manufacturing paper bags to the institute. SBI Managing Director and Group Executive (Associates and Subsidiaries) V.G. Kannan; SBT Managing Director Jeevandas Narayan; Chief General Manager (Retail Banking) E.K. Harikumar; and institute principal Mothi K. Habeeb spoke.
A youth with multiple challenges play the keyboard and names the corresponding day of any date.
