Gift a sight @ ARM

ARM India celebrated the 60th year of Independence by Promising a Gift of Sight. The day we celebrate our freedom, we thought the best expression of our feelings towards our country and its people will be to promise freedom from darkness.

Blindfold yourself for 2 minutes and try walking around. Sit on your chair for 20 minutes with the blindfold on. Imagine how you would feel if this blindfold was tied on forever. This is the situation with the 1.5 million people who today are unnecessarily blind. The only way their vision can be restored is by corneal transplant. But eye banks across the country are facing acute shortage of eyes. Much of this is due to lack of awareness among the people. Looking at this need, we invited Dr Kannan Narayana, a well known Ophthalmologist from Narayan Nethralaya to come and make us aware of the process of donating eyes.

The beautiful eyes on the posters that were put up to invite the people and the short messages that accompanied them set the mood right for the eye donation awareness programme.

The programme was organized on the 16th August in the cafeteria. As always, people at ARM were at their enthusiastic best and we had a good number of people who came to attend the programme. A pleasant surprise for all was the highly informative talk by Dr Narayana on eye care and eye related problems. Dr Kannan showed us the advance techniques that are available for eye care. He also explained to us the factors one must consider before choosing a treatment plan for the eye in case of problem.

In specific many employees were keen to know about correction of vision using LASERs and other cosmetic eye procedures. The session was interactive informative and enjoyable.

After the educational drive, Dr Kannan indicated the importance of eye donation. He explained show eyes donated by donors are given to the patient free of cost and only the charges for the surgery are taken He also explained that most of us can donate our eyes even if we have poor vision.

Towards the end 20 of us finally pledged to donate our eyes. The enthusiasm of the employees can be gauged from the fact that they were actually taking extra forms for their family members and promising to come back next day with more donors enrolled.