The Scribe

I was so afraid of missing the alarm that I could hardly sleep. After waking up 3-4 times in the middle of the night, finally I was glad to see the clock tick 5:30AM and my alarm took off with its "my heart is beating" tune. Yes it was indeed beating aloud.

I volunteered to act as a scribe for a visually challenged student. The very thought of not being able to make it to the examination hall in time would give me shivers because I am reminded of a scene in Stalin Telugu movie where the agony faced by the student is shown. I informed Ranjith when I was starting and by 7:15Am I was there at the hall even before Ranjith himself arrived.

Ranjith arrived with his mother and it was hard to believe that he was visually challenged. He would look at your face when you are talking! He is that sharp. I checked the room number at the hall and sat in the staff room. As soon as the bell rang, I was asked to get the question paper from the hall that was assigned to Ranjith. The hall was wrongly allotted, after some running around, I could finally catch hold of his question paper.

I read out the questions to him once and he was cool. He seemed to know most of them. He wrote the exam well. He attempted almost all questions. The interesting thing here was that we were writing the exam in a staff room and the staff were all excited to help him with his answers while he was pretty comfortable answering himself :-) !! ..

Everything went smooth except for one thing that Ranjith was being troubled by the authorities there for getting a different scribe for every exam. (It seems only one scribe should write all exam and that too a scribe not from his subject). He was requesting me to check if its possible for the same scribe to go on 17th and 19th for him. That would lessen the pressure on him. They were literally scolding him.

And as an experience for me .. it was new ... the way he was presenting the answers .. he would say.. "this in the next line sir" .. "leave a space of 2 words here sir" .. etc .. and in the middle .. "lets assess the time once sir... how many more questions do I have and how much time is left sir" .. etc . these were some things i will not forget .. and the kind of issues he was going through .. his mom was saying that the other day he fell sick due to the pressure and the uncertainty about the scribe!! .. and I could relate that because when I called up to tell him he was like .. I was very tensed sir.. thank you very much sir etc ..

I was trying to ask him how do you usually arrange for your scribes. He said his ma'am arranged or something. I could sense a lot of uncertainty in the whole thing. After struggling so much with the audio lessons for hours and days .. they definitely deserve some help to present the things they have grasped. It is a very sad state to see that they need to worry so much about it .. I felt very bad about it.

Guess what .. some of the questions in the exam .. he said .. i don't have this material in form of cassettes sir .. so they are out of my scope sir !!! .. I wondered what the text to speech systems are doing lying idle in the labs of research centers if they cant reach out to such needs.

I felt an urgent need for some kind of streamlining of this scribing process. There are so many volunteers and there is so much need .. its only the gap of a bridge ... a platform .. . And if rules like same scribe should write all exams is there, then some kind of pay to scribe system can also be thought of. There are hundreds of students who are in need of small money also. So, something like if they are paid 200 or so for each exam they scribe, the students can avoid these kinds of issues from authorities .. and I am sure there will be many to sponsor for scribes. Lets see if these thoughts take some shape some day ...

I thank Samvedana for providing me with this opportunity.