On 22 May, as she does on the twenty-second of each month, 26-year-old Upasana Makati, the editor and owner of the magazine White Print, carried a pen drive to the offices of the National Association for the Blind, in Worli, Mumbai. There, she loaded text files of completed articles onto a computer with Duxbury, a program that, over half an hour of processing, converted them into Braille. Then Raman Shanker, the director of the NAB, proofed and corrected them on a Braille terminal, marshalling any stray dots into order. The finalised files went to a Braille printing press, for a run of about 300 copies. Those were staple-bound, and dispatched to subscriber addresses across India.
White Print, a 64-page, financially independent monthly, is the country’s first and only registered Braille magazine in English. The 2011 census counted 5 million Indians with visual disabilities. Makati is not blind herself, nor did she know anyone who was when, in 2013, she founded the magazine, after realising that beyond a small number of newsletters and newspapers India’s blind population lacks current reading material. This May, working at it doggedly and full-time, she published White Print’s second-anniversary issue, carrying 12 interviews with accomplished women. Getting this far has meant surmounting some hurdles common to the Indian magazine world, and others unique to an innovative Braille publication.
“I often get asked how I came up with this and I honestly do not know,” Makati told me. “It was just a thought that I came across.” In early 2012, she saw a pile of magazines in her Mumbai home and wondered if they had Braille equivalents. She knew no blind people to ask, but searching online and asking her friends she “concluded that there were in fact no such magazines.” More exploration took her to the NAB in Worli, where Shanker promised her the use of the group’s printing press if she registered and compiled a publication.
COMMENT