Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre: Moving on from stop-and-start

TISA a public charitable trust and selfhelp movement for people in India who stammer conducts workshops at YMCA Ghatkopar to help develop participantsrsquo communication and leadership skills PicsSatej ShindeGo to a park and talk to a stranger After each encounter note down the colour of the persons eyes along with other facial characteristics did he have a moustache was she wearing a teeka or kaajal Follow this routine for a few weeks until you are mentally adept at registering key facial features within the first few minutes of the dialogue Soon you will develop firm eye contact with anyone you talk to As you stop looking away which most stutterers do you will develop a positive body posture Your firm gaze not stare will be your way of telling the world that you can communicate despite your stammer and you want others to receive it as a distinctive speech diversity not a handicap or a disorder that you are ashamed ofThis Eye Movement Training is one of 10 crucial steps laid down in the selfhelp manual created by Mumbaibased Dhruv Gupta and Dehradunbased Dr Sachin Srivastava founders of The Indian Stammering Association TISA that offers participants an Effective Communicator Certificate at the end of a courseGupta who works in a climate change mitigation firm has experimented with a variety of speech therapies to deal with his own stammer Before he settled in Mumbai and crystallized the selfhelp group that meets at a Ghatkopar venue every week and sometimes in Borivali he took on disconnected professional assignments including reviving a restaurant in Guangzhou and studying postharvest food security at an Oregonbased nonprofit All of these required him to hone communications notwithstanding the stammerLeft to right Dhruv Gupta Bhavana Patil Saurabh Pandey and Ashok Agicha of the The Indian Stammering Association TISATime six years spent in America to learn more about the programmes run by the Stuttering Association for the Young and the American Institute for Stuttering helped him gather ammo to put to use at TISA where he has been a volunteer since 2013 and he later founded the Speak Stammering Foundation a registered nonprofit that seeks to gather resources for those who struggle with a condition when the flow of speech is interrupted by involuntary repetition or prolongation of soundsToday Gupta and his core team of 20 volunteermentors have a clear goal ndash use the stutterers manual to build a closeknit community of People Who Stammer PWS in the city Around one per cent of Mumbai stutters accounting for more than 20 million in the city the national average is also 1 per cent yet it has been difficult to shape a network of people who can allot time to group therapy It is not that cities around the world have better participation rates Having collaborated with groups in London and New York both with a sizeable stammering population he says they have a miniscule percentage of members who participate in a collective effortSelfhelp groups in India too are perceived as optional needbased programmes which stutterers subscribe to only when they want to fix the stammer before a job interview after a situation of ridicule or before they look to get married Studies done by TISA show that most are comfortable with hiding or camouflaging their stammer and theyd rather seek treatment that doesnt tax their daily routine This often encourages quackeryBhavna Panchamia whose 23yearold son Rishabh is a PWS has written to the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Women and Child Welfare mdash their petition is on changeorg mdash seeking awareness assistance and social dignity to those who stammer PicNimesh DaveThe Mumbai manual hopes to challenge this letscureit in haste practice It demands a good twoandahalf months of a stutterers time if he chooses to take the course in a classroom setup with regular home exercises It can extend to longer if the regimen isnt followedAs of now the 10step manual has been set into motion for 160 stutterers in Mumbai all connected on a WhatsApp group and through the selfhelp class Meanwhile the citys unorganised stutterers have been asked to let the stammer out at Mumbai Stammers One Day Conference scheduled at Somaiya Vidyavihar on May 27 much on the lines of the May 28 NYC Stutters event Several workshops have been designed to be held as part of the Mumbai conference free of cost so that the city appreciates the history of the selfhelp movement in India and in turn becomes a model for citycentric stutterers conventions for smaller metros like Dhanbad Patna Panaji Meerut and Jaipur where TISA hopes to penetrateWhile the loosely held community of PWS uses fun components like role play video and audio recordings Google Hangout daily emeets and Skype chats across continents to battle the speech challenge the manual hopes to offer each a mentorevaluated context where each exercise has a collective and a meditative dimension For instance the Draw Your Stammer Iceberg activity asks the participant to look inward and jot down all the visible face grimaces eyes closing and invisible manifestations of stammering avoiding speech changing an order in a restaurant to duck pronouncing a convoluted phrase This iceberg helps to map the physiological and psychological problem though it is not to be called a problem in TISA circles on a piece of paper It also leads to an acceptance of the stammer and cuts out the associated shame The manual goads the participant to share starting with inanimate objects and then moving to humans his or her stammer matter of factly not as a sentimental sob story In fact there are special jokes devised around stammering Stutterers are encouraged to stick up a TISA poster or have a coffee mug with stammeringrelated inscriptions Haklao magar pyar se and proudly declare that they belong to a VIP club of stutterers like Darwin Newton Churchill Bruce Willis and Hrithik RoshanThe vocalization exercises for PWS are essentially a replay and review of words accents pitch pronunciation and breath control The technique of Bouncing repeat the first sound of a word before saying the full word and then the sentence in the normal speed and Gentle Onset prolong the vowels soften the hard consonants are broken down in exhaustive detail with entertaining examples in the manual It lists common glitches and attitudinal blocks of stutterers who have left their therapy midway out of boredom or frustration Interestingly older people who once showed readiness to play with their throat in the selfhelp group in Mumbai have not been able to keep up the regularity Sionbased exporter Viren Gandhi 46 was the first to initiate a Mumbaindashcentric Yahoo group to connect with others like him But soon work and family commitments took precedence Life continues in this city of distances I must admit that I still struggle with my speech block I wish younger people make the effort to form clubs online and offline We need to consciously create an extended family Like any other family this one also cannot survive on its ownHarish Usgaonkar 36 the Goa coordinator of TISA agrees In Mumbai life is too fastpaced to allow a Sunday evening meeting for PWS Yet the Mumbai group is among the more active TISA constituents In Panaji we have struggled to retain our members Hopefully the structured manual which we have implemented in bits and parts will add the zing of a classroom to our workInterestingly TISA organises one Skype meeting and one daily Google Hangout session for all members on a national level although few PWS know of it and fewer still avail of it There is a reason why onlookers can join the session those who dont stammer should know the source of a challenge for many around them The stammer needs a hearing a patient oneSumedha RaikarMhatre is a culture columnist in search of the subtext You can reach her at sumedharaikargmailcom