TGIKS: Kapil Sharma hosts special episode for visually impaired members

On Wednesday, August 13, while Kapil Sharma and his team shot an episode of The Great Indian Kapil Show with Akshay Kumar at Film City, Goregaon, loud laughter echoed from Netflix’s Bandra office — courtesy of 25 visually impaired audience members enjoying a special screening of another episode of the comedy series.

In collaboration with the National Association for the Blind (NAB), the streamer hosted the event to highlight its audio description feature that allows visually impaired viewers to understand visual cues like facial expressions, gestures, and silent movements in films and shows. “A lot of things without audio description get ignored for us because we don’t understand their expressions or small moves like when they dance or walk. When the voice-over described those, it filled gaps in our imagination,” Nishi, an audience member, told mid-day.

Rituraj, an HR professional and tech geek, added, “Without audio description, we can only experience 60 per cent of a visual story. It showed that Kapil Sharma is doing action with his finger up, and [Navjot] Sidhu is pointing at Kapil with a pillow. So, there is a visual there. With the audio description, we make up visual cues in our mind. The structure in the mind is ready, and we can imagine the action. For example, Kapil is lying down — without the audio description, we don’t know what is happening. But with it, we can feel it 100 per cent.”

Kapil Sharma and Archana Puran Singh

Dr Vimal Kumar Dengla, spokesperson for NAB, stressed the importance of adding a human touch. “The feature needs to be upgraded a bit, because emotions and feelings are still missing from the voice-over. Also, the description shouldn’t overlap with the original audio, especially when there’s movement and speech at the same time.”

Sharma, along with Archana Puran Singh, Kiku Sharda, and Sunil Grover, met the audience and expressed their joy at the show’s reach. “As performers, there’s nothing more rewarding than knowing your work can reach more hearts. Being part of this special screening, where every joke and moment could be felt and experienced equally, was a beautiful reminder of why we do what we do,” Sharma said.

Singh shares that she sees the visually impaired community not just an audience but also as a collaborator, which can aid sensitive storytelling. “It is one thing being sensitive and another being over sensitive. [The idea is not to] differentiate between them and us. We can collaborate with members of the community while writing stories or characters with visual impairment to achieve an authentic representation.” Recalling a visually impaired stand-up comic, she said, “He cracked the deadliest jokes on blindness. As a judge, I was put in a fix, thinking, ‘Do I laugh at this?’ because they were diplomatically incorrect. But he said, ‘Ms Archana, I can’t hear your laughter. By not laughing at my joke, you are doing injustice to me.’ That was such an eye-opener.”

For Sharda, the experience was a lesson in normalisation. “You don’t have to be sympathetic towards them. They don’t want that. Be sensitive, but don’t go overboard because then you are treating them as different, which is not what they want.”