Chetna Nagpal
Chetna Nagpal was born blind to visually impaired parents. While some would call it the epitome of darkness but for Chetna all she knew was that she had to illuminate not just her family’s life but also the lives of visually impaired people across India. Her health issues never left her and she was detected with type 1 diabetes at the age of 3 for which she takes insulin twice a day which she has to do all her life now.
Chetna’s father was too possessive about her and hence was reluctant to send her to school due to health issues which started as soon as she was born. But she was an innate fighter and finally joined Saksham school to learn braille and computer training for 2 years. After her satisfactory performance at Saksham, she joined Salwan Public School in class VII and completed her class XII from the same school with an excellent score of 92.25 % (CBSE) in Arts stream. She struggled with her school management to get a writer because the school was managing their first visually impaired student who was appearing for class XII board exams from their institution. The school first informed her that the writer will be provided by CBSE but she found out that the CBSE writers were not up to the mark from many of her friends. She finally convinced her school teachers and managed to get approval for a writer from class XI who finally wrote her exam. Even her CBSE result was held up for 2 weeks which was the most tumultuous period of her career when she was not even informed by the board why they had held up her results. She once again struggled for getting her result out and it was only after creating immense pressure on CBSE that they released her result along with the mark sheet and certificate of passing. Chetna then went on to join the prestigious Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University, to pursue her graduation degree in political science honors. She has recently graduated successfully with flying colors.
She is an inspiration for music performers being a fine singer and has been winning accolades since school days itself. She now runs a Foundation called Golden Shine along with Mr. Ankur Gupta who is another fine visually impaired musician. They teach music free of cost to persons with disabilities under the aegis of Golden Shine and organize events to showcase the talent of not just their students but also other disabled musicians from all across the country.