Picture this scenario. At the world final of the Abylimpic Photography Championship at Shizouka, Japan, – where participants generally happen to be professional photographers soaked for years in the tricks of the trade – enter this hardware geek from South India, a 33-year-old with a self-effacing smile and a glowing face that bears no reflection of the limp in his leg. Chennai’s P Saikrishnan, who took to serious photography just two years back, bags the silver medal, the first-of-its-kind honour for India in this arena. 

P Saikrishnan has done the country proud by bringing home the silver medal from the much-watched and recently concluded World Abylimpic Photographic Meet, for physically challenged persons. “Like everybody, I like shooting pictures, but had never thought of it seriously. Two years back, I heard about the Abylimpics; it was then I got serious about photography,” Sai says.

“Documentary photography was the task given to me, and what we were to do was to take five documentary pictures, develop, print and mount it, and give it a title within the allotted seven and half hours on the day of the meet,” he says. It seems simple to hear, but international standard documentary photography involves a number of technical requirements of composition, light, visual points of intersection, etc, which take a lot of training to achieve.

Never having had international exposure, Saikrishnan had to recourse to acquiring it from people who have had it –  like Sharad Haksar, Sadanand Menon, and Gnyana Sekaran. He also enrolled himself into a professional photography course, and went about roaming through the city shooting away to get the specifics right. So out went Saikrishnan to click flyovers in construction, the busy and packed shopping spaces of Ranganathan Street in the heart of Chennai, the drama in the beaches, life in the suburbs, nearby villages…The competition also required an expensive hi-tech camera, and Saikrishnan couldn’t afford it. For a while, it threatened to put a hold on his dreams, until his company HCL Infosystems intervened and gave him a Canon 5D camera and laptop to take a go at the championship.

The photographs which won him the silver included that of a cycle assembly in progress, for which Saikrishnan had placed the camera on ground so that the shot acquired a different angle and perspective, where the cycle assembly takes centre stage and even the assembler is pushed to the background.  His second picture, enigmatically named ‘Light Hole’ has a circular highlighted frame and darkness around it, with the central circular frame showing the participants busy in their work.

The third picture shows a woman participant assembling an electronic gadget; here Saikrishnan has blurred the woman and thrown the focus on the sophisticated gadget being assembled, effectively stating that the disability does not mean incompetence.  His fourth picture focuses on one eye of a woman knitting, while his fifth shows the Indian team celebrating. Explains Saikrishnan, “The idea I wanted to convey is this: Nowhere is handicap an issue, or a bar to productivity. The disabled can be at par with the best of the abled”.

The eight days in Japan have also come as a great experience to this young man.  He saw the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, roamed through a Japanese village, saw the ruins of ancient Japanese buildings… “The Japanese are an amazing lot. I know it sounds like a cliché, but they are active and hard working, and they hold such a respect for work; and this includes even their 80 and 90 year olds. The driver of the bus I commuted by in Shizouka was an 85-year-old. And you know what, when this man saw me in my wheel chair at the bus stop, he got down from the bus to draw open the ramp and wheeled me into the bus!” Sai says, adding, “The Japanese have a lot of life in them, never mind their biological age. There, you have grannies cycling; it would have called for a photo shoot in India, but there, it is just normal”.

Back in India now, life has been busy for this young man post this award; presentations, press interviews. And besides, Sai’s own visits to people like Sharad Haksar, to personally thank them for their inputs towards his camera skills. It will take time getting back into the normal pace of life, to his hardware job and the MCA degree he is pursuing alongside. Pausing to retrospect, Saikrishnan says, “There have been times when I have given in to self pity, regretting my polio attack and the disability it left me with,,” admits Sai. But, not anymore. He says, “In fact, at the competition, I met others with really severe disabilities clicking away cheerfully, I felt quite blessed.”