There is no easy way to describe what happens to a person in complete darkness. Language, which relies so heavily on visual metaphor, struggles with it. You have to have been there. On 8th June 2026, 120 FLO Lucknow members were there. Hotel Taj Mahal hosted Dialogue in the Dark — and the venue, usually associated with light, chandeliers, and the particular brightness of formal occasions, became something entirely different.
A space where sight, the sense that organises and interprets almost everything in a professional woman’s day, was simply gone. What happens next is different for each person, and that is exactly the point. Some members described an immediate disorientation — the loss of visual anchoring that most people have never consciously experienced. Others spoke about the heightening of sound, of touch, of spatial awareness — the way the remaining senses rush in to fill the gap with an intensity that is, in its own way, overwhelming.
Several described moments of unexpected calm — the stillness that comes when there is genuinely nothing to look at, nothing to assess visually, nowhere for the eye to go and therefore nowhere for the restless mind to follow. Facilitator Anant moved the group through the experience with a steadiness that was itself instructive. He navigated the room knowing exactly where he was in space that was impenetrable to everyone else — a small, practical demonstration of what adaptation and expertise in the absence of sight actually looks like when you are standing next to someone who has built it.
The empathy that emerged from the session was not manufactured. It was the natural consequence of spending time in a world that 285 million visually impaired people globally navigate every day — and find hard. When difficulty is felt rather than described, something shifts. Members left Hotel Taj Mahal talking about the experience in the present tense, not the past — as if it were still happening to them. Which, in the ways that matter, it was. Simran Sahni’s instinct to bring this experience to FLO Lucknow was the right one. Some things cannot be taught. They can only be entered.