Blindness did not stop me from fighting, said Kartik Sawhney, the visually challenged student who is now set to make the nation proud, by being accepted to Stanford. He was in Chennai on Saturday to conduct a workshop on Maths and Science Learning for visually impaired students. This young achiever, who just graduated high school, is someone who a lot of individuals look up to. By successfully completing his Class 12 with a 96 per cent score, he became the country’s first ever visually impaired student to pass, studying science. In fact, he is the first visually impaired student to have taken up science after class 10. After not getting into IIT three years on the trot, Kartik Sawhney chose to move abroad, to Stanford University where they awarded him a full scholarship to pursue his degree.
Life hasn’t been easy, he admits, as he had to fight with the CBSE when he was initially denied admission to study science in classes 11 and 12, because ‘blind’ students were expected to be happy studying language and history. But he finally succeeded and got admission to study science at the Delhi Public school.
Now majoring in Computer Science, Kartik says that it was a natural choice as computers were his companion, growing up, “I use a screen reading software called JAWS that reads out the digital content of the material, so I wrote all my exams in school with the help of these softwares,” he explained during the event. His extreme passion for computer science, pushed him to design many applications that will help any visually impaired student to understand science and math better. His ‘vision’ is clear – make more apps for visually challenged people to make their lives and opportunities better.