Saliya Kahawatte

A memoir by someone who lost a lot of his eyesight as a child, tried to hide this fact during most of his adult life. Later he got cancer. To make things worse, chemotherapy destroyed his hips and he’s handicapped as well.
As is usual with these memoirs, it has to get very, very bad, before it gets any better. Surprisingly at no point in the book did I like the main character at all. All his life he acts selfish and careless and a lot of people stand by him and help him deceive everyone about his eyesight.
His denial of his own disability makes him powerful in some respects – he never feels sorry for himself and he learns to do a lot of things. But on the other hand it also means he never even learned about Accessibility Software until he’s forced in a training for blind people by the unemployment office.
Now that he found god, is a Buddhist and stopped drinking and doing drugs and started his own consultancy company he has very rigorous rules for the people surrounding him, before he dumps them. Which is beyond unfair, considering how he treated his friends and girlfriends, who he put through a lot of shit.… (más)