A Hearing-Impaired Achiever, Ayush Marathe, uses art to sensitize the world towards equal communication.

Mumbai, India, Aug 9th, 2021 – Ayush Marathe, a Senior Graphic designer and also a profoundly hearing-impaired individual, stands emphatically for equality in communication during this Pandemic, through art.

The devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic has left people distraught. Countless lives have been lost, industries and businesses have collapsed and it has raised concerns on a lot of livelihoods. In the same pandemic, a hearing impaired individual has his own set of challenges.

Hearing impaired individuals rely on lip reading to gauge the speech of others and it helps them navigate in a world where spoken language is the primary mode of communication. With masks and face shields covering the mouth, the journey for Ayush and differently abled individuals like him, has encountered a speed breaker. They are obviously having a difficult time deciphering human speech.

From an offline to an online world, understanding what peers, seniors or subordinates say in the post Zoom world remains a challenge.

Not to speak of social distancing that has further put spokes in their scheme of things. They are deprived of collateral communication support thanks to the lack of proximity. Visual cues like facial expressions, body language, stance, gait, aura, breathing patterns and the entire gamut of subtle but accurate ways to decode language are no longer available to them as people need to maintain a distance. As Ayush puts it, everything needs to be spelt out, literally. He stresses the deployment of the written word to overcome this additional challenge. Subtitles, texts, emojis have assumed a greater role in his professional and social network.

Ayush has been an achiever, despite his handicap and now a senior graphic designer in a well-known global asset management firm, he feels that diversity and inclusion should be redefined in this pandemic. Loss of communication, comprehension and for people like him, their very survival in the corporate world has posed a new set of challenges which need to be addressed immediately to stop the gap between the challenged and the abled from widening further.

His designs depict a world where every normal person can understand the need to overcome this issue for the hearing handicapped and try their best to communicate to them with the help of captions, transparent masks and other innovations that help in addressing this problem which denies a level playing field to the differently abled.

Ayush’s effort to sensitise the world is laudable. He has convincingly tapped the visual medium to fill in for an audio shortcoming. His posters, his appeals on a global platform, his awareness designs and his effort to find solutions, not with cudgels but gently through artistic renditions, place him a niche of his own.  

You can connect with Ayush on Linkedin on this link – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayush-m-63253314/