Blindness felt like falling through a trapdoor: sudden, terrifying, final.
In those early years, the urge to see burned inside me like hunger. I would keep my eyes open, roll it around to catch even a mild shadow of objects in the vicinity, will the darkness away. What followed was always the same: a vicious ache that clawed behind my eyes, a headache that gripped my skull until I surrendered.
That darkness took me back to the last summer I saw everything clearly, 1990.
I was seventeen, hopelessly in love with sport. Tennis, soccer, athletics, anything that demanded speed, grace, and heart. My mother had to drag me away from the television for dinner. If you asked that boy to choose between food and replays of Wimbledon, he would have survived on serves and volleys alone.
And what a Wimbledon that was.
The final that year was a classic clash of styles and temperaments: Stefan Edberg, the cool, graceful Swede, against Boris Becker, the fiery redhead from Germany. Their rivalry was the perfect symphony of contrasts, Edberg’s artistry at the net versus Becker’s explosive power from the baseline.
That July evening, I remember sitting cross-legged before the television, watching Edberg glide across the grass with that silken serve-and-volley game that seemed almost unfair in its elegance. Each point was a lesson in timing, geometry, and grace. Becker roared, dived, and fought with the raw energy of a man trying to outpunch fate itself.
It was more than a match. It was theatre.
When Edberg finally triumphed, his last Wimbledon crown, the applause in Centre Court thundered through my small living room in Chennai. I remember thinking, ‘If beauty could be captured, it would look like this.’
And then, just hours later, the magic shifted continents.
Diego Maradona, football’s flawed genius, led Argentina into the World Cup final in Rome. I can still hear the hum of the crowd, the chants that rose and fell like a single breath. It was an ugly, scrappy, heart-stopping match against West Germany. Maradona was kicked, fouled, and shadowed, yet he moved like mercury, dribbling with that defiant grace that had defined him.
But fate can be cruel even to gods. A penalty sealed Argentina’s loss, and Maradona, my childhood hero, walked off in tears.
I remember lying in bed that night, heartbroken. Not just for him, but for something I could not name. Maybe it was the realisation that beauty and pain often arrive together, that even magic has an expiry date.
The glow of that summer, of heroes and heartbreaks, lingered, unaware of the shadow gathering at its edges. Two months later, my eyesight began to fade.
What I mourned most in those early days of blindness were not faces or colours, but motion: the swirl of a rally, the flight of a football, the rhythm of life unfolding in movement.
But I never complained. I was seventeen, and I thought courage meant pretending you were fine. So I consoled my mother, joked with my friends, told everyone I was all right, even when I was not.
The nights were the hardest. I would lie awake, remembering Edberg’s volley, Becker’s roar, Maradona’s defiance, and wonder: ‘Why would God let me see such beauty only to take it away?’
For years, that question looped inside me like a broken record.
Thirteen years later, life played one of its jokes on me.
It was January, the fag end of what counted as winter in hot Chennai, and I found myself sitting inside the SDAT Tennis Stadium, a sprawling, world-class facility at the heart of my city. Chennai was now hosting an ATP tournament, and I was there to cover it as a journalist.
Press card around my neck. Mini tape recorder in hand. Sitting in the media box with sighted journalists.
When the first serve thundered across the court, something stirred inside me.
The ball’s pop, the grunt of the server, the sliding shuffle of shoes on the baseline, each sound painted a picture in my mind. I could see it all, without seeing anything.
That week, the court became my canvas. I watched, through sound, Karol Kucera of Slovakia, smooth and unhurried, playing with a kind of detached artistry. Then came Magnus Norman of Sweden, all power and precision. Even a fading star like Mark Philippoussis, with his booming serve and old-school flair, brought back the elegance I thought I had lost forever.
One match that caught my attention was Norman struggling against an American, Taylor Dent, who was serving like a madman. The sheer speed and audacity in Dent’s serves rattled even top-five Norman. I could hear the tension, the scramble, as Norman fought to respond, point after point.
I sat there, in that media enclosure, and it felt as if those images from 1990 had returned to me, not through my eyes, but through my imagination.
Every match was a reminder that what I had lost in sight, I had gained in sensitivity.
When I listened to the rhythm of rallies, I could sense who was dominating. I could feel momentum shift before the crowd reacted. My blindness, once a prison, had become a tuning fork.
During press conferences, I asked questions that had little to do with statistics.
“How do you handle a dip in form?”
“How do you come back from defeat?”
“How do you stay in love with the game when nothing seems to go your way?”
I was not just asking for my readers. I was asking for myself.
Because blindness had been my defeat. And I was still trying to learn how to make a comeback.
But even in that rediscovery, there lingered a shadow, that old feeling of being trapped, dependent, confined. It did not vanish until the day I held the fragile-looking white cane in my hand.
That slim, unassuming tool looked like a symbol of pity from the outside. But once I began using it, it became my passport to freedom.
The white cane gave me autonomy. It gave me confidence. It gave me a way to move, to explore, to live without apology.
Every tap on the pavement was a declaration: I am here, I belong, I can find my way.
That is the real paradox of blindness. What feels like the end often hides the beginning.
And now, decades later, I see the same kind of liberation in something else: AI.
Just as the white cane gave me mobility, AI gives people creative movement.
For me, describing an image to an AI tool and hearing it come alive on a screen feels almost magical. It is as if the pictures in my mind finally have a bridge to the outside world. What my eyes cannot see, my words can now shape.
That is why I believe AI is not just technology. It is a translator of imagination. It lets writers, photographers, musicians, anyone, express what once felt impossible.
It is not about perfection. It is about participation.
Because freedom does not always begin with sight. Sometimes, it begins with sound, or touch, or curiosity, or simply the courage to create despite your limits.
And in that sense, the white cane and AI are not so different.
Both turn what seems like limitation into liberation.
Both teach you to see, without seeing.