ANNOUNCEMENT:
A 2-hour get-together of AccessIndia members of Andhra Pradesh and
Hyderabad
is planned for Saturday November 2nd, 2013.
Time: 10.30am. Venue: Conference room: Main Building: the EFL University,
Hyderabad.
Mr. Kiran Kaja from Adobe, London who will be the special guest will
deliver
a talk on accessibility and technology in the west.
The talk will be followed by an interactive session in addition to An
exhibition of latest gadgets, mobile phones with accessaries and other
computer-scanning equipment.
All AccessIndia members and visually impaired friends from Hyderabad and
even from other parts of Andhra Pradesh are welcome to attend the
programme.
Kindly spread the news about the programme and make it a success.
please indicate your willingness to attend the programme by writing to me
or
even by calling me on my mobile.
my personal email ID
[email protected]
My Mobile: 08121007486.
With Regards,
Rajasekhar
The EFL University
Hyderabad
-----Original Message-----
From: AccessIndia [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf
Of avinash shahi
Sent: 27 October 2013 18:15
To: jnuvision; accessindia
Subject: [AI] Living with Four Senses,By V Shoba
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/living-with-four-senses/1187813/0
She would like to smell ripe mangoes and the wet earth after it rains.
Shachina Heggar, a woman who has lost her sense of smell, makes up for her
sensory deprivation by indulging in nostalgia For Shachina Heggar, tea is
coffee is hot water. "It all tastes the same," she says, sipping a chai
latte. Long after I have finished my fragrant cappuccino, Heggar takes her
time with her now-tepid tea.
"Right now, I can smell water. Can you smell it?" she asks. "It's a fresh
smell. I don't know how else to describe it." Heggar can't smell anything.
Hold a jar of Vicks Vaporub under her nose and she won't know it from goo.
But, every now and then, a heady nostalgia interrupts the sensory
deprivation and she finds herself surrounded by imagined aromas - of wood
burning at the farm in NR Pura, Chikmagalur district, where she grew up;
of
hot akki roti; of jasmine on the vine.
Most of us have a range of about 10,000 different smells that we
recognise,
take for granted, and appreciate or wrinkle our noses at.
For 27-year-old Heggar, who lost her sense of smell about a decade ago,
only
a handful of olfactory memories remain. These phantom smells surface at
will, nesting in her mind for weeks and often months, as real to her as
the
smell of the coffee on the table is to me.
Heggar wears a T-shirt, a miniskirt and Burberry's Weekend perfume.
She has never known its fragrance, but a friend she trusts picked it out
for
her a few years ago, and it is one of only two perfumes she wears. It is
flowery and bright, with a hint of musk and fruit. "That sounds like
something I would wear," she says. Her vivacious personality does match
the
scent. She flippantly attributes her disability to three accidents in her
childhood, a small scar from a particularly bad fall still visible on the
ridge of her nose. "I was about seven or eight months old, playing on my
dad's chest, when I fell and hit the edge of the cot. The scar has been
there since,"
Heggar says. But her response to olfactory stimuli began to deteriorate
much
later, at the age of 18, and a medical examination failed to reveal the
cause of the problem. "You must think I am crazy not to have it looked at
again. I hate being subjected to medical scrutiny," she says, joking that
she is happy not smelling the garbage piling up on Bangalore's streets.
Of course, for every bad odour she is blissfully oblivious to, there are a
hundred aromas Heggar would like to sniff. A foodie and a self-taught
cook,
she gorges on biryani but is unable to conjure the wafting fragrance of
basmati rice. Since much of what we consider to be taste is actually
smell,
Heggar can't really experience flavour. "I can tell if the food is salty,
sweet, sour or bitter, but that's about all," she says. "I make up for it
by
trying to imagine flavours I remember, and by focusing on texture,
temperature and presentation."
But some things remain elusive: she wants to smell ripe mangoes and
searches
for the aroma of earth after the rains.
"Shachina is a thorough foodie. She is one of those people who can go to a
restaurant all by themselves to enjoy a meal," says Sowmya Jaganmurthy, a
friend who swears by Heggar's home-cooked biryani.
Earlier this year, when Jaganmurthy was pregnant, Heggar helped satisfy
her
cravings. "The two of us have driven all the way to Mysore just to eat at
a
restaurant. That's how crazy she is about food," she says.
The irony of a foodie without a nose is not lost on Heggar. An engineering
dropout-turned-fashion designer, she came close to becoming a chef. "I was
deciding between fashion and cooking school,"
she says. "Luckily, I chose right." Heggar retails her eponymous
Indian-wear
label at a few stores in the city, besides designing clothes for Kannada
films. Her repertoire of 26 films includes Junglee (2009), Paramathma
(2011), Charminar (2013) and Topiwala (2013).
The last time she thought she could taste something, Heggar was trying
exotic meats at a food street in Singapore. Each piece was beautiful,
textured and hinted at delectable, if imaginary, flavours. "The idea of
flavour is exciting to me," she says. When we meet two days after her
return
from the trip, she is ecstatic about another episode in Bali. "I was in a
cab making my way to the hotel from the airport when this exotic smell hit
me. I rolled down the windows, I thought I could actually smell again and
even called some friends," she says. It was everything she wanted a
holiday
to smell like -sandalwood, spice and musk - but the next day, her nose
drew
a blank once again.
Heggar's friends say she likes to travel, perhaps, in search of an
impossible scent that even her nose would pick up. "She is a strong
person.
She is so used to living without her sense of smell that we often forget
about her condition," says Dipanjay Sanyal, an ad filmmaker, who has known
Heggar for eight years. According to Sanyal, Heggar makes a mean paella
but
can't tell if the leftovers in her fridge are rotten. "It is a health
scare,
and since I live alone, my friends come and make sure I don't eat anything
that's gone bad. Just like they check the gas stove for leaks," Heggar
says.
Outside the realm of medicine, Heggar has tried every trick in the book in
the hope of regaining the bits of the world now lost to her - aroma
massage,
looking at a pile of garbage, even repeatedly ordering her beloved
strawberry margarita. A mention of the drink, probably the last she had
before she lost her ability to smell, makes her smile.
One day, last year, she woke up to its sweet aroma, and the feeling stayed
with her for over two months, night and day. "I must have been the
happiest
person on the planet. I could only smell strawberry margarita for weeks,"
she says, wistfully. Yet, these sensory surges aren't under her control.
They are involuntary, like the memories of childhood triggered in Marcel
Proust when he had a fleeting taste of madeleines years later.
Scientists have known for a long time that odours trigger emotional
connections. Indeed, research suggests that smells can influence mood,
memory, emotions, mate choice, and the immune and endocrine systems.
"My friends joke that I will never get married because I can't smell the
pheromones on the men I date," says Heggar. Pheromones are chemical
signals
that animals use to transmit messages to one another.
Forget subtle signals, Heggar cannot smell her own shampoo. Living and
non-living things release certain chemicals that upon entering the nose
dissolve in the mucus inside. Beneath the mucus is a membrane containing
olfactory receptor neurons that can detect thousands of odours. These
receptors transmit information through the olfactory nerve to the
olfactory
bulb, which in humans is located in a rather inaccessible region at the
back
of the nose. The bulb, in turn, communicates signals to the brain. Thanks
to
this shortcut to the cortex, the sense of smell travels to the brain very
fast compared with other senses. Heggar says she would like to have access
to this primal cue some day. Dr T Sankarshana, a well-known ENT surgeon,
says anosmia - the loss of smell - affects about 20-30 per cent of the
patients he receives, but in most cases it is reversible. "Bangalore is
the
allergy capital of India. The reason for sudden loss of smell is often an
obstruction in the olfactory region," he says. As for Shachina, she says
she
"would like to know my husband's smell when I do get married". And she
hopes
to get there with her nose held high.
--
Avinash Shahi
M.Phil Research Scholar
Centre for The Study of Law and Governance Jawaharlal Nehru University New
Delhi India
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Disclaimer:
1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of
the
person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity;
2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails
sent through this mailing list..
Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of
mobile phones / Tabs on:
http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in
Search for old postings at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
To unsubscribe send a message to
[email protected]
with the subject unsubscribe.
To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes,
please visit the list home page at
http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
Disclaimer:
1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of
the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its
veracity;
2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails
sent through this mailing list..
