Tedx Lahore: ‘People with mental disabilities need inclusion’

Speaker says govt needs to pay attention to health and education needs of autistic children

LAHORE: People with mental disabilities need inclusion, not sympathy, 16-year-old Muhammad Haseeb Abbasi, who was diagnosed with autism four years ago, said on Sunday.

He was speaking at a Tedx Lahore talk arranged after six years. Abbasi stressed the need for respect towards people with mental disabilities. “Most people sympathise with us but they don’t want to understand us,” he said. He urged the government to cater to healthcare and education needs of autistic children.  He said he had been diagnosed with autism at the age of 12. He said he was eight years old when he had first encountered difficulty in speaking.

He recalled his mother’s struggle to find a school for him and said none of the schools she had approached were willing to admit him. When he eventually got admitted to a school, he said communicating with the teachers and other students was a challenge. He said as he progressed through the school, he found it harder to cope with the course work.

Abbasi, who has won several gold medals in Special Olympics, received a standing ovation on his talk.

The event featured 10 speakers. It’s theme was Umeed-i-Sehr (hope of a new dawn).

Rizwan Nusrat, a marketing solutions manager at Gaming Revolution at Product Development (GRID), spoke about a game he had developed to promote use of toilets among rural children. He said several studies had found that violence in video games was responsible for promoting aggressive behaviour in children. “I think games can have a positive impact as well,” he said. Flushed was developed with such an intention, he said. “The aim is to encourage children from low-income families and rural areas to use in-door toilets instead of defecating in public,” he said. He said the game was designed to work on low-quality smart phones. He said his obsession with a computer game called Sims had led him to start a games development company.

Izzat Majeed, founder of Sachel Orchestra, showed several clips to introduce the idea behind his musical venture and the music produced by it. He said the orchestra featured classical musicians but also played jazz music.

He said when they had decided to set up the orchestra he and his friend Mushtaq Soofi had visited 16 music studios in Lahore. He lamented that a number of musicians had left the country during General Ziaul Haq’s government. He said since then no attention had been paid to culture. There were no institutions to promote music industry, he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 29^th,  2016.