GIVING WINGS TO DREAMS

Dr. Jitender Aggarwal (45), Founder and CEO of Sarthak, is transforming India’s landscape for ‘people with disabilities’ (PwDs). Krishan Kalra spoke with him at length to learn about the Good Samaritan’s life and what drove him to this crucial area for inclusivity of the country’s 30 million or more PwDs.

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Days merged into nights and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. With two dental clinics to manage in West Delhi between him and his wife, and a three-year-old to come back to, life was as perfect as it could be. “At least that is what I thought,” Dr. Jitender Aggarwal says with a smile. But the best was yet to come his way, as he puts it. In 2004, while he was examining a patient’s mouth, it seemed blurry. He adjusted the light overhead, but it didn’t help much. Must be the exhaustion of the extended hours, he decided, and began the next day just like another. Till he noticed his vision still seemed cloudy.

The ophthalmologist confirmed that ‘macular degeneration of the retina, which was to slowly but surely result in vision loss’ had set in his eyes. “I did not know what hit me. The day passed in a haze,” he recalls. How would their lives pan out? What about his work? How would he look in a beard, if he couldn’t shave? How would he drive to his clinic? These and a million other questions crowded his mind. Perhaps the diagnosis today was just a bad dream? Maybe he would wake up the next morning and everything would be just fine. Sadly, it wasn’t so. He was angry, utterly dejected, irritable, sometimes all of this, and much more.