Being Blind

The other night my friend and I went to Andrea Bocelli's recorded concert at IMAX  (the grand movie theater located at Meydan hotel). The original show was recorded from Portofino-Italy, and I think it was also on Valentine's day. The whole thing was magnificent and the songs were inspiring! I was surprised that the singer had his eyes closed all the time, I thought he is a crowd shy person? But when in most scenes his eyes remained closed I asked my friend and she said that he is blind!! I was so surprised, for two reasons, one he walks, moves, sings and plays the piano like a person who sees well, and that no where it was written that he is blind. 

I was of course ashamed of myself for not knowing that he was blind, not that it would have made a difference, I would have still gone to the show, but just not to feel like idiot when I mentioned to the woman next to me about my ignorance she was surprised! Now I even love his songs more. 

Then I was thinking of our countries, do we encourage people with disabilities? The only places we see blind people is on the streets begging! And if the person is not begging then he or she will not be working, or doing anything of any importance. We do have some well known writers who were blind, one was a poet in  Islam named Alaasha, and an Egyption writer called Taha Hussain. I must research more blind or deaf known Arabs just to prove myself wrong. 

Is it the society that brings up the best in people no matter what body deficiencies they have? Or is it the person himself who aspires to become something and ignores his deficiencies and only focuses on his or her talents? Is the talent taught or from within? Do we need to have schools that look after creative people or we must leave the job to each and every school on the face of earth? Should the schools be free so everyone can get the chance to go to there to be discovered? Should the governments look after those with deficiencies and try to find if they are talented in one way to the other? Or the families should do that?

I don't know really, there are many questions in my mind? One of them is of course did everyone who attended the show in Portofino knew that Andrea Bocelli is blind? Or it didn't matter for them as they went to listen to his entertaining voice only? 

I will leave the answers to my questions to the educators.