On 22 May, as she does on the twenty-second of each month, 26-year-old Upasana Makati, the editor and owner of the magazine White Print, carried a pen drive to the offices of the National Association for the Blind, in Worli, Mumbai. There, she loaded text files of completed articles onto a computer with Duxbury, a program that, over half an hour of processing, converted them into Braille. Then Raman Shanker, the director of the NAB, proofed and corrected them on a Braille terminal, marshalling any stray dots into order. The finalised files went to a Braille printing press, for a run of about 300 copies. Those were staple-bound, and dispatched to subscriber addresses across India.
White Print, a 64-page, financially independent monthly, is the country’s first and only registered Braille magazine in English. The 2011 census counted 5 million Indians with visual disabilities. Makati is not blind herself, nor did she know anyone who was when, in 2013, she founded the magazine, after realising that beyond a small number of newsletters and newspapers India’s blind population lacks current reading material. This May, working at it doggedly and full-time, she published White Print’s second-anniversary issue, carrying 12 interviews with accomplished women. Getting this far has meant surmounting some hurdles common to the Indian magazine world, and others unique to an innovative Braille publication.
“I often get asked how I came up with this and I honestly do not know,” Makati told me. “It was just a thought that I came across.” In early 2012, she saw a pile of magazines in her Mumbai home and wondered if they had Braille equivalents. She knew no blind people to ask, but searching online and asking her friends she “concluded that there were in fact no such magazines.” More exploration took her to the NAB in Worli, where Shanker promised her the use of the group’s printing press if she registered and compiled a publication.
Makati’s first struggle was to find a name for the magazine. As required of all new publications, she applied with five possible titles to the Registrar of Newspapers for India, which enforces a law that “no newspaper or periodical should bear a title which is the same or similar to any other newspaper or periodical already being published” in India or abroad. Two and a half months later, she heard back that all her chosen names were taken; “On the Dot,” for instance, was registered in South Africa.
Makati submitted another five names, this time including some Sanskrit ones. Meanwhile, she worked out other details. Braille takes up roughly twice the space of Latin script, so she calculated she would need 30 pages of content in visual text for every issue. To aim at financial sustainability, each copy would be sold at R30, with annual subscriptions at R300, and also court advertising. Since some Braille publications “tend to focus only on topics like hygiene,” Makati said, she decided hers would range widely, sourcing from volunteers and writing herself to cover everything from politics to cinema and travel.
The second set of names was rejected too. Disheartened, but egged on by friends and family, Makati tried yet again. Finally, in February 2013, “White Print,” the first name on her last list, was approved. Makati “literally jumped for joy,” she said, then got to work immediately; as per the rules, if she didn’t put out an issue within three months she would lose the title.
Today, the magazine’s biggest worry is balancing the books. Shipping is easy, as Indian Post carries small packets of Braille material at no cost, but Makati has to pay the NAB for printing. Advertisers have been wary of the non-visual format—Makati reached out to 150 corporate houses for the first issue, but only one, the textile firm Raymond, bought space. A major dairy company recently backed out of a contract insisting that ads had to carry its logo. So Makati adapted: “I have now got 3-D cards printed so that logos can be etched in the advertisements.”
Makati told me she hoped India’s large and underserved blind population tempted more advertisers to reach out to them in print. Accessible text-to-speech software has opened up new content for blind people, but many are still strongly attached to Braille. Subscribers often tell her, she said, that reading Braille gives them a great sense of independence. Shanker, at the NAB offices, agreed. “There is a different pleasure in reading on your own,” he said.