President Pratibha Patil had once blindfolded herself to experience the life of a visually impaired person but says she could not bear it even for an hour.

"Whenever I interacted with blind people, I thought how they lived their life? I even blindfolded myself to know what will be my life without light. But I could not remain like that even for an hour," she recalled today while receiving the first copy of a book on the struggle of a blind girl Siddhi.

An economics graduate from the St Xavier's College in Mumbai, Siddhi Desai, lost her eyesight when she was six years old but her mother ensured that she got the best of education.

A resident of Thane in Maharashtra, Siddhi's mother Sushmita had an intercaste marriage and lost her husband when both her daughters were just kids. When Siddhi was six, she lost here eyesight following a reaction to a medicine.

"The very first feeling of being blind is very frightening. But my mother ensured that I never get that feeling. She asked me to overcome the fear and be confident about myself," said Siddhi who is the protagonist of a Marathi book written by a college teacher Vrinda Bhargave,'Why not I'.

With the support of her mother, Siddhi cleared every examination with flying colours and chose Economics and Statistics for advanced studies.

"I want to go abroad and pursue research in economics. I chose the subject because it gives me best of both Science and Humanities. Statistics was the best companion to study with economics, hence I chose that," Siddhi said on the sidelines of the function.

Statistics meant a lot of calculation, tables, long formulae and it was even more difficult to write the examinations with the help of a writer.

"With someone else writing your examination, you have to be perfect. You have to dictate everything right from comma, full stop and every such thing. I learnt it with the help of my mother who suggested me to visualise the answers in my mind rather than cramming them," she said.

The tabulated data posed a major challenge. "I had to ask the writer which data is in which cell. Then I used to do calculations and give answers to the person who was writing my answers," she said.

It was one of her teachers who informed author Vrinda, who was teaching at a college in Nashik, about her.

"She told me her story over phone because my mother was fighting cancer and I could not go to Thane. We met also but she used to become emotional and start crying. I realised she was comfortable over phone. That's how I completed the book," Vrinda said.