Dyslexia

I am a regular reader of the Scott Adams blog. Today's post was interesting - he is on the list of famous people who have dyslexia.

The first time I ever heard of dyslexia is 8 years back when I came to US. I did all my schooling in India. And in India (at least in the 1980s), if you had trouble reading or spelling, you are just someone who is not smart enough or you are too lazy to study!! You could never claim immunity behind an illness. No one that I grew up with was diagnosed with dyslexia. No one had ADD, ADHD or any of those fun illnesses. I never heard of anyone who was allergic to peanuts or is lactose intolerant. Coming to think of it, no one had restless leg syndrome either! I am not saying that none of these illnesses exist in India - these are unknown conditions and you just deal with it as part of day to day life!

I think this country is the most paranoid of the lot. Anything other than normal is scary. And normal itself is a very narrow category. The drug companies realized that they are sitting on a gold mine and started identifying all these illnesses. I don't mean to be insensitive to people who are afflicted with any of these illnesses. A headache might be a symptom of a lot of things. But it could also be just a headache!! You keep hearing these commercials of wonder drugs (which you have to ask your doctor about... apparently listening to the ad makes you a better diagnostician than someone who studied medicine for years!!). And you might have some of those symptoms. And so eventually you start thinking that you must be sick!

But then I digress... I was talking about dyslexia. Curiosity got the best of me and so I checked out the website to see who else is there in the list of famous people with dyslexia. And the first thing that caught my eye is this picture of Billy Banks - the Tae-Bo guy! Click on the image below for a larger view of the image.



Either whoever put this picture in this article has a good sense of humor or I have some illness that makes me spot such oddities.