Reel life inspires Dubai student to assist special kids

Dubai - Last year, Dubai-based Sadhna shot into fame with India's Best Child Artiste Award for her powerful performance in the Tamil movie Thanga Meengal (Golden Fishes), which was her debut in acting.

Sadhna Lakshmi Venkatesh, a Grade 8 student of GEMS Our Own Indian School in Dubai, feels blessed to have become the face and voice for training hundreds of Indian children with cerebral palsy.
Last year, Dubai-based Sadhna shot into fame with India's Best Child Artiste Award for her powerful performance in the Tamil movie Thanga Meengal (Golden Fishes), which was her debut in acting.
Of late, Sadhna accidentally stepped into a new role in audio-visual tutorials for disabled children in India when she began training herself for a character in her second movie that will start filming next month.
Both Sadhna and her parents consider this opportunity to help the disabled children as a greater chance in real life than doing the role of the disabled child in the reel life.
The new Tamil movie will also be directed by Ram, who made Thanga Meengal.
It will have Malayalam megastar Mammootty and Sadhna in lead roles, Sadhna's father Venkatesh told Khaleej Times.
"After she won the award, she received a lot of offers... But, we were not so keen on anything until Ram came up again with another socially relevant subject.
"This one tells the story of a single father raising a child with special needs and has a very good social message. A universal subject, and so we gave her the go ahead," he said.
Mammootty's daughter
Sadhna is doing the role of Mammootty's daughter in the film as a child with cerebral palsy. "I was deeply touched by the story. I knew it is going to be a big challenge for me as I don't have dialogues and need to act it out through just expressions and gestures," said Sadhna. The little actress had to learn the way the differently-abled children sit, walk, move around and interact with others.
During her summer vacation, her parents took her to the National Institute for Empowerment of Persons with Multiple Disabilities (NIEPMD) in Tamil Nadu, from where the family hails.
"Within days, she developed a rapport with those kids and she was very keen to help them also," said Venkatesh, sales director of a software firm in Dubai Media City
The NIEPMD officials were so impressed with the dedication and congeniality of Sadhna that they found her an apt person to help them with a new app to assist speech therapy for spastic children. "They used her audio-visual to teach them some 650 words....She spent a lot of time to make sure she delivers the words properly," said Venkatesh.
After working with those kids, Sadhna has understood them better and is now keen on assisting Special Educational Needs (Sen) children attending her school, said Gems-OOIS Principal Lalitha Suresh. "We already have a "buddy system" for Sen children and another "children for children" programme where brighter children stay back in school to help weak students. Sadhna is now taking part in such programmes."
sajila@khaleejtimes.com