Chennai’s Museum of Possibilities hosts art and technology exhibits for people with disabilities
The Hindu
Museum of Possibilites aims to be a haven for the differently abled featuring assistive devices that cater to their specific needs
Looking out from the terraced front of the Museum Cafe at the Marina, you can see the statue of Avvaiyar, Tamil Nadu’s famous woman scholar-poet of the Sangam era.
She is leaning on a stick. Her verses resonate through the centuries as rhythmically as the waves crashing against the sands. The stick in her hand could be a symbol of the diverse aids to special visitors, as they are helped into the newly opened Museum of Possibilities by the Commissionerate for the Welfare of the Differently Abled at the Lady Willingdon Institute campus. There are people on crutches, on mechanised wheelchairs, on walkers, or those who have come with families or personal assistants, being led into this newly designated space along a sloping red tiled gradient.
Inaugurated in early June by Chief Minister MK Stalin, the museum has a cafe on the first floor above the actual museum, which is an integral part of its planning. It has been collaboratively designed by people with disability, or PwDs.
“Good morning!” says Appu, a man with dwarfism standing at the entrance to the cafe. Appu is a familiar face in the city thanks to the many years he spent as a greeter at the city’s first Mexican restaurant. “Appu started with us in 1995, at the Don Pepe restaurant on Cathedral Road and is still with us,” says M Mahadevan, popular city restaurateur best known for launching Hot Breads, after which he opened a number of popular city restaurants including Writers Cafe, Benjarong, Sera, Marina and more. Mahadevan introduced Chennai to tacos and quesadillas with his usual flair for innovation, though he is best known for creating a croissant with a chicken tikka filling.
Just as Mahadevan has mutated from being the one of hottest items on the automated bakery circuit into a compassionate entrepreneur who created the idea of Winners Bakery to empower the underprivileged by teaching them practical skills, Appu has been elevated into a guardian at the cafe. Mahadevan’s The Winners Bakery concept, created in response to the post tsunami-era in 2005 with the participation of Government bodies like the Chennai Corporation and institutions like Rotary, is centred around imparting vocational skills to the deserving, teaching them to bake, customise their products and set up individual bakeries within the community.
A striking graphic on the wall shows a circular banana leaf in the form of a thali, filled with food items from our amazing culinary heritage, including, let it be said, a portion of fried fish , and the message: “Diversity completes Life”, designed by Purshottam. It underlines the vision behind the creation of the Museum. It’s not just for the disabled. Equally there are lessons to be learnt by architectural students, city planners, senior citizens and in public spaces such as toilets and malls.
“Live.Work.Play.” is one of the many mottoes devised by Poonam Natarajan of Vidya Sagar, the NGO that has been chosen to manage the State Government-funded project. They have been given 2500 sq. feet of space from which they have managed to carve out a visually stunning series of wall spaces and cubicles with assistive devices like disability-friendly toilets, sensory musical instruments adapted for use by PwDs, and chessboards that have perforations on each piece as well as hollowed-out squares, so the visually-impaired can feel their way around the board.