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Ashley Jain

Ashley Jain is a technology wizard who is fascinated by the world of sign language that he discovered late in life. He loves travelling the world, he has been to 22 countries and has a weakness for long drives.

Ashley stands out as he is one of the very few deaf engineers from India. He graduated from the world renowned Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD) completing the Bachelor of technology (B.Tech) and Master of technology (M.Tech) in Computer Science on 2019. He has designed the famous Access Mantra website (https://www.accessmantra.com/), which is widely popular in the deaf community as the 'Google for the Deaf'. He has been working as Data Scientist at Rakuten in Tokyo, Japan from 2019 right after he graduated from college.



Ashley Jain was born on 8th September, 1995 at Delhi, India. There are four members in his family. His father is businessman in traditional women garments at Chandi Chowk, mother is housewife. There are only two deaf members in his family - him and his elder brother.

Ashley has secured 95% score in CBSE class 12th in science stream. This high score and being topper of school (among science stream) really got him interested in joining engineering college.

He mentions that he endured many struggles in school and college, but now thanks to disability law in Japan - he has full disability access in his corporate job.

During the school years, he used to read the topic on the previous day, with help from Google (primary school) and with help from private teacher (secondary school), so that he would be able to cope next day looking at blackboard and lip-reading. He saw his brother struggling in education, this made him resolve to work harder on school studies. When he topped the 12th class - his school teachers finally understood that deaf "can do" anything regardless of disability.

When it came to college, there were many unstructured topics. So, he used to collect the topics of each course, and went through those topics on coursera.org & udemy website, watch all videos with subtitles and discuss with college teachers if there were any doubts.

In 2018, he made a late entry into the 'Sign Language World', he shares his experience:

"I was invited by the deaf leader, Dr. Alim Chandani who wanted to hire a deaf technologist for making an app and website and he introduced me to the deaf team (staff). I was surprised that the whole deaf team was talking in sign language and this made me quickly learn sign language. 

After two months of working with the deaf team, I realized that I was very comfortable communicating in sign language (rather than lip-reading). I felt proud of being deaf and most importantly I realized that I lacked acquiring this language during my childhood. I wondered if my parents were not wrong for making me to join non-deaf schools, it was wrong of doctors to not give awareness of sign language and deaf world to my parents i.e. there is no official law for deaf world in India like official sign language or accessibility environment for deaf world in school and workplaces."

Ashley's Achievements

- Awarded Higher Education Scholarship (for being in top 1% performance in 12th Board examination) by CBSE under INSPIRE scheme

- Received Achievement Congratulation Letter from Smriti Irani, MHRD for attaining top performace in 12th Board Exam

- Secured the 12th rank (among physical disablity category) of JEE advanced entrance examination (one of the toughest exams in the world)

- Completed the degree of B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer science at IITD.

Ashley notes that struggle is an integral part of learning and development, his message to everyone is:

"Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle".




Comments

  1. ShreecaterersSeptember 26, 2022 at 6:46 PM

    The way you explain a complex topic in an easy-to-understand way is really impressive. Wedding Planners in Bangalore

    ReplyDelete

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