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    "result": {"pageContext":{"language":"en","pathURL":"priyanka-agarwal","isDefaultLanguage":true,"storyData":{"Name":"Priyanka Agarwal","Alt_Photos":null,"Alt_Text_Photo1":"Mid shot of Priyanka Agarwal (42) sitting in a black computer-chair in front of a silver-coloured laptop. The laptop is on a brown wooden table and her fingers are on the black keyboard. To the right of the laptop there is a large computer monitor with text showing on the screen. Priyanka’s long, straight black hair is parted in the middle and she wears a pair of black headphones. Her top has thin horizontal stripes of pale yellow and white and the sleeves, pushed up to the elbows, have frilly edges. The open window in the beige wall behind her has white horizontal bars.","Alt_Text_Photo2":"Priyanka sits on an adjustable weight bench in a gym with a pale grey floor. The bench has a black seat and pale grey metallic frame. She is barefoot and wears black pants and a waist-length beige top with short Magyar sleeves and round neck. She is holding up a pair of black dumbbells to shoulder level. Her feet are apart, back straight and chin up. The wall behind her is black with a corrugated surface. There is a pair of black dumbbells lying on the floor to the left. To the right of the weight bench there is another piece of black gym equipment – a lat pull-down machine.","Alt_Text_Photo3":"Side shot of Priyanka sitting cross-legged on the floor. She wears a full-sleeved kameez with diagonal stripes of white and golden yellow, a golden yellow salwar, and a golden yellow silken dupatta draped across her shoulders. She sits in front of a brown wooden rack with two shelves. The base of the brown wooden rack has two drawers. The bottom shelf has a small female idol with an ornate golden crown and a yellow full skirt spread out in a circle. There are small brass pooja items next to it: a bell, a diya holder, a kalash (urn), and a plate. The top shelf shows a small bottle of oil and a brass diya with a white cotton wick.","Alt_Text_Photo4":"Priyanka, wearing a mud-brown half-sleeved, round-necked, corduroy top and grey track pants, is in the kitchen. Her hair is held back with a black plastic headband. She stands in front of a black marble platform. She holds a small steel bowl in her left hand and a tablespoon in her right. The spoon contains a liquid she has taken from a tall, cylindrical steel vessel below it. To the right of the vessel there is a steel plate containing six cream-coloured gol gappa (crisp round shells meant to contain pani puri). Behind it on the platform there is a closed steel dabba, a steel dish containing the potato filling for the pani puri, and a jade green plastic receptacle containing spoons, knives with black handles, and a pair of scissors with jade green handles. To the left of the plastic receptacle there is an upright white paper roll of kitchen towel. The wall tiles are squares of different shades of brown and grey.","Alt_Text_Photo5":"Priyanka and her husband Dimpesh Bhatewara (38) sit on a wooden divan bed. The bed is pushed against a beige wall in which there is a window with horizontal white bars. A mocha-brown curtain is drawn to the left. Dimpesh sits to the left with his legs over the side of the bed. Priyanka sits cross-legged to the right, facing Dimpesh. They are smiling broadly at each other. Dimpesh wears a dull, burnt-rose, half-sleeved knitted shirt and grey shorts. He wears specs with black square frames and his short black hair has a side parting. Priyanka wears her mud-brown corduroy top and grey pants. Each of them holds a white porcelain cup, Priyanka holding it in her right hand resting on her right thigh, and Dimpesh cupping it with both hands resting on his lap. The mattress on the bed has a design of cerulean blue and pale grey on a white background. There is a white porcelain saucer between them on the mattress. It contains a samosa. A grey and black backpack behind Dimpesh leans against the window sill. A grey peaked cap face-down is hooked on to on the front of the backpack.","Alt_Text_Video":null,"Photo1_URL":"https://egsweb.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/Priyanka_Agarwal/_O2A3562.jpg","Photo2_URL":"https://egsweb.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/Priyanka_Agarwal/_O2A3473.jpg","Photo3_URL":"https://egsweb.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/Priyanka_Agarwal/_O2A3652.jpg","Photo4_URL":"https://egsweb.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/Priyanka_Agarwal/_O2A3619.jpg","Photo5_URL":"https://egsweb.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/Priyanka_Agarwal/_O2A3586.jpg","Name_English":"Priyanka Agarwal","Language":"en","Disability":["rec7wLjRz1nopX3Cz"],"Gender":"Female","Instagram_Content":"Priyanka Agarwal (42) from Bengaluru may have become the second Indian woman with blindness and first from Karnataka to reach Mount Everest base camp but the uphill climb that symbolises her life has been no less of a Himalayan feat.\n\nPriyanka has Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), an incurable genetic condition where the vision progressively deteriorates. She struggled through school and college as the symptoms gradually took hold of her. After completing her B.Com she took up a series of telemarketing jobs where she was awarded for her work. She took the National Association for the Blind three-month computer training course for the visually impaired and applied for jobs. After two crushing disappointments she did three months of training at Enable India and got a job in IBM, where her career soared. In August 2019 she joined Dell where she currently works as a Technical Program Manager. She took a loan and bought a house which she got designed to suit her needs. Dimpesh Bhatewara (38) met Priyanka during an Inclusive Walkathon she had organised. They fell in love and, overcoming stiff opposition from his parents, got married in December 2023.\n\nPriyanka says after attending the India Inclusion Summit (IIS) in 2015 and listening to the disabled speakers there it changed her perspective on life. In 2016 she was invited to be a speaker at IIS and in 2025 she was an emcee. One of the speakers was Tinkesh Kaushik, a triple-amputee whose NGO promotes accessible adventurous sports for the disabled. He was organising an inclusive 12-day trek in April 2026 to the Everest base camp. This caught Priyanka’s attention. The rest, as they say, is history.","Quote":"“Instead of fearing the future, accept today, and do the things that make you happy”","Status":"Published","Video":null,"Website_Content":"Priyanka Agarwal (42) from Bengaluru may have become the second Indian woman with blindness and first from Karnataka to reach Mount Everest base camp but the uphill climb that symbolises her life has been no less of a Himalayan feat.\n \nPriyanka’s businessman father moved from Kolkata, where she was born, to Ernakulam in Kerala, where she completed most of her studies. Her first stumbling block appeared unobtrusively at the age of 10 when she found she could not read the blackboard from the last bench in class. The doctor prescribed glasses but didn’t reveal to the family that she had Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), an incurable genetic condition where the vision progressively deteriorates. When she was in tenth standard, during the mid-term exams she could barely make out the questions in the Hindi paper. Somehow she passed the Grade 10 final board exams.\n \nOn the next visit to the doctor, in 1999, he revealed she had RP. Since none one else in her family had it – not her parents or her two older sisters or younger brother – he said a recessive gene might have caused it. “Until then I could see, would walk, take public transport,” she recalls. “I loved cycling.” Her family hoped that taking vitamin A and eating a lot of carrots would slow down the decline. However, other symptoms gradually crept in: night blindness, colour blindness, tunnel vision. From Grade 12 onwards she had to ask teachers to read aloud the exam questions.\n \nIn 2004 she completed B.Com from M.G. University, Kottayam. One of her sisters started working. “This inspired me. Girls don’t work in my conservative Marwari community,” she says. “I too was determined to work.” She took up a series of telemarketing jobs where she received positive feedback for her communication skills and was awarded for her work. Then in 2007 the family moved back to Kolkata because her father’s business wasn’t looking up. She tried hunting for jobs but her call centre experience didn’t suit any of them because they involved field work. She stayed at home for five years during which her mother taught her cooking and household chores.\n \nMeanwhile, in 2009, Priyanka went to Nepal for a cousin’s wedding. She met his fiancée’s visually impaired friend, Surabhi, who showed her the computer screen reader software, JAWS. She was fascinated and asked her brother, who worked for Google in Hyderabad, to find out if there was any organisation in India like the NGO in Nepal that had taught Surabhi JAWS. He came across the National Association for the Blind (NAB) and she joined their three-month computer training course for the visually impaired. \n \nPriyanka started applying for jobs online. There were two on-going recruitment drives: in Wipro and IBM Daksh. After raising her hopes during the interview rounds, both companies crushed them with the same response: they could not install JAWS on their computer system. She remembers going back utterly disappointed after four rounds of what she thought were successful interviews at IBM. “I cried all the way home,” she says. “I asked the universe to give me just one more chance, to give me an equivalent or better job offer within one year.”\n \nPriyanka threw herself into volunteering at NAB, learning, teaching and helping others. She got in touch with Enable India and, after persuading her parents to let her go to Bangalore, underwent three months of training. Job placements followed the training and she finally got a well-paying job at IBM in 2012, exactly a year after her rejection! \n \nAt IBM her career soared. Besides doing well at work, she was an enthusiastic volunteer, orchestrating many events as team leader of the core group for disability which was twice awarded the best group across IBM. In 2018 she decided to buy a house. She made the initial deposit, took a loan, and got the house designed to suit her needs. Her family was stunned when they realised she had done it all on her own. In August 2019 she joined Dell where she currently works as a Technical Program Manager. \n \nThe house she bought acquired another occupant because love found its way in! Back in IBM she had organised a Blind Walkathon and Dimpesh Bhatewara (38) had come to pick up T-shirts for the event. They got acquainted, lost touch during Covid when he went to his hometown, reconnected in 2021, and realised they loved each other. After his divorce and after struggling against massive resistance from his parents, they finally signed on the dotted line in court on 4 December 2023.\n \nAn important part of Priyanka’s volunteering endeavours has been her encounter with the India Inclusion Summit (IIS). “I became Priyanka 2.0 after 2015” is how she puts it. That year she attended IIS and was blown away by the disabled speakers at the event. “It changed my perspective on life,” she says. The following year she was invited to be a speaker herself, and in 2025 she was an emcee. One of the speakers was Tinkesh Kaushik, a triple-amputee whose NGO promotes accessible adventurous sports for the disabled. He was organising an inclusive 12-day trek in April 2026 to the Everest base camp. This caught Priyanka’s attention.\n \nThe rest, as they say, is history. Standing at the base camp she visualised Mount Everest as the peak she’d seen as a child in picture books or in the movies, a triangle with the base either brown or grey, and the top half white. She clarifies the climb wasn’t some long-cherished ambition; she has no list of ‘feats’ she plans to achieve. “These things come up before me and a voice tells me, you can do this” she explains her approach, echoing the famous words of George Mallory who, when asked why he wished to scale Everest, replied, “Because it’s there.”\n","State_name":"Karnataka","Display_Order":265}}},
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