The manager naturally expected us to have a menu ready. “So, what would you like to serve?” he asked.
We told him that we did not have a fixed menu.
“You choose,” we said. “Keep it simple, make sure the food is good, and make sure nobody has any problem.”
He seemed a little surprised. For a convention of this size, most organisers would probably have arrived with a menu already decided. But we had no interest in telling a hotel manager what he should cook. We knew what mattered to us; he knew how to make it happen. So we left the decision with him.
It was a small decision in the middle of a very large undertaking.
The convention was called Blind Stars Beyond Facebook – Bridging the Gap. The name itself told the story of where it had come from. A group of blind people had created a Facebook group called Blind Stars, and what had begun as an online space had grown into a community of thousands. People who might never have met in their ordinary lives were communicating with one another, exchanging information, sharing experiences and building friendships through a screen.
Now we wanted to see what would happen when that community stepped outside Facebook and met face to face.
By the time the convention arrived, around 160 visually impaired people from different parts of India had come to Agra. They were not coming simply to attend a programme organised for them. They were coming to meet people they had known online, discuss issues that affected their lives and spend several days together. There were discussions, brainstorming sessions and conversations around education, employment, technology, accessibility and many other aspects of life with blindness.
But before all those discussions could happen, there was the ordinary business of getting everyone into the right place.
The MSW students who were helping us had never worked with such a large group of blind people before. A team of around fifteen to twenty students had been brought into the programme, and they were initially unsure about how they would manage the participants.
Then the participants began arriving.
The students were ready to help them enter the venue, guide them and show them where to go. But very quickly they discovered something they had not expected. Many of the blind participants simply walked in themselves.
Some had travelled long distances. Some had travelled alone. They knew where they were going, they knew whom they had come to meet and, in many cases, they needed much less assistance than the students had imagined.
The students’ first task was therefore not really to teach the blind participants how to manage. It was to learn how to stop assuming that they could not.
That was one of the most important things happening at the convention, even though it was not written in the programme schedule.
The same thing happened with Peeyush Bardia from Jaipur.
Peeyush had lost his sight only a few years earlier. He had heard about the convention but had been hesitant about travelling without his family. He finally decided to come only a few days before the event, travelling with two blind friends and an eight-year-old boy. They arrived without even having confirmed their accommodation.
When they reached the venue, they were welcomed and given food. Later, when they reached their hotel, he found that arrangements had been made for them with a level of care and dignity that he had not expected. He later wrote about the experience and about how the volunteers had helped make the entire visit comfortable.
That was the kind of work happening behind the convention.
There were no grand speeches involved in arranging a room, helping someone find transport or making sure that a meal reached the right person. Yet those small things were what allowed the larger gathering to happen.
And that was why the hotel manager could choose the menu.
We had already understood that we could not run a convention of this size by making every decision ourselves. If we tried, we would spend all our time checking small details and leave very little space to actually think about the people and the purpose of the convention.
So we trusted people.
We trusted the hotel manager to handle the food.
We trusted the students to handle responsibilities that were given to them.
And the students gradually began treating those responsibilities as their own.
At one stage, we gave them around ₹10,000 to manage the expenses they had been asked to handle. We did not want them coming back for permission every time something small had to be paid for. They had the responsibility, and we wanted them to use their judgement.
When the convention was over and we looked at the accounts, we realised that they had spent around ₹8,000 more than the amount we had given them.
We told them we would reimburse the additional amount.
“No,” one of them said.
We insisted that the extra money should not come out of their pockets. But they still refused. They had already spent it and did not want to take it back. Their reasoning was simple: we had already done so much for the convention, and this was something they could contribute themselves.
It was a small financial sacrifice compared with the scale of the convention, but for us it said something important.
The students had arrived as volunteers. Somewhere along the way, they had started feeling that the convention belonged to them too.
That transformation was happening on both sides. The blind participants had come together because of a community that had begun on Facebook. The sighted volunteers were meeting people whom they had previously understood mainly through assumptions. The more they interacted, the more those assumptions began to disappear.
The convention was not simply taking blind people beyond Facebook. It was taking everyone involved beyond the limits of what they thought they knew about one another.
The online group had created the connection, but meeting in person changed the nature of that connection. People who had previously been profile pictures, names and comments on a screen were now sitting across from one another, sharing meals, travelling together, discussing their lives and making friendships.
That was the real meaning of “Bridging the Gap.”
The gap was not simply between the online world and the physical world. It was between people who had been separated by distance, experience and assumptions.
A student who had initially wondered how she would manage a blind participant discovered that the participant might not need her help at all.
A blind person who had hesitated to travel without family found himself travelling, staying in a hotel and participating in a gathering with people he had previously known mostly through Facebook.
And a group of volunteers who had come to help discovered that they could become part of something rather than simply serve it from the outside.
Even the convention’s discussions reflected that larger purpose. The participants were not merely listening to others speak about their lives. They were speaking for themselves, discussing the barriers they faced and working together on what needed to change. Those conversations eventually contributed to the Agra Declaration, which brought together their concerns and demands around issues affecting the lives of visually impaired people.
But when I think back to those three days, I do not remember only the formal sessions or the declaration.
I remember the hotel manager asking what should be served and our telling him to decide. I remember students who had initially been unsure about working with blind people discovering that their assumptions were often more limiting than blindness itself. I remember people who had known each other through a Facebook group finally sitting together in the same room. And I remember the students refusing the additional money they had spent, even though we had offered to reimburse them.
Perhaps that is why the menu matters to me.
We could have controlled every dish, every expense and every small decision. Instead, we gave people room to use their own judgement. The hotel manager knew his kitchen. The students knew what needed to be done on the ground. The participants knew their own lives.
The convention worked because everyone did not have to wait for us to tell them what to do.
Blind Stars had begun on Facebook. The convention took it beyond Facebook. But somewhere along the way, the gap it bridged was much larger than the one between a screen and a room.
It was the gap between doing something for people and trusting them enough to do it with you.