If  I  look around , I see  lush green trees, colourful  flowers, blue  sky  and the bright faces of my friends.
If I close my eyes very tight, I see no flowers, no colours but darkness & only darkness. This has been the case of lakhs of blind people through out their lives. The only colour they know is  Black.

But now with developments in ophthalmology, at least some of them can hope to see the real world just as we do. This is possible due to "Eye Donation".

Cornea is the outer transparent layer of the eye. Due to some diseases or injury, burns etc, the cornea of some people becomes cloudy resulting in total blindness. If cornea grafting is done to such patients, they can overcome blindness.

For this all that is required is  eye donation from the dead. If we donate our eyes now, then after our death, instead of burning or burying our eyes, we can provide vision to two people. Eye donation can be done by persons of any age, even those with poor eye sight, diabetics or those who use spectacles. But the only point to be taken care of is that the cornea should be removed with in six hours of death.

Unfortunately, in India, in spite of the high death rate of about 80 lakhs per year, the eye donation done is only about 5000 per year. This is mainly because of many misconceptions prevailing in the society. People think that after the eye donation the corpse will look fierce, some think that the body has to be taken to the hospital etc. And of course some superstition is also attached to this. But I can assure you that this is a very simple procedure. Because two years back, when my granny died, we donated her eyes. All that we did was to look up the directory and call up the Rotary people. They came to the spot within about 15 minutes, removed the eyeballs and even kept artificial eyeballs to the dead body. As a mark of thanks they garlanded the corpse with a Sandalwood garland and they also gave a certificate of thanks. The whole thing was very simple and the body remained undistorted.

As  responsible citizens, let us donate our eyes; let us motivate others to donate eyes. When a donor dies let us inform the Eye Bank without fail.