Sheer determination and lots of perseverance will certainly turn the adversities into achievements. This is perhaps turning out to be true for 10-year-old Keonjhar boy Premranjan Moharana and a 12-year-old Bhubaneswar girl Subhashree Swain.

Born with double deformity of cleft lip and cleft palate, Premranjan and Subhashree are now not only speaking fluently after two successful surgical corrections each but are emerging as amazing singers.

A first-year student of Sangeet Visarad, Premranjan is waiting for the results of the AIR audition and the Indian Idol audition for the current season. Having performed in over a hundred stage shows, he is an acclaimed performer of local music TV channels.

Subhashree too, after coming under the scalpel when she was only three-month-old to correct her cleft lip and a rigorous cleft palate surgery when she was nine-month-old, is now the darling of music channels, undeterred with her misaligned jaws and the buck tooth.

Both the singing sensations with their renditions on Sunday last enthralled a crowd of over a hundred children, who had undergone paediatric plastic surgery to correct their congenital abnormalities at the SBM Plastic Surgery Hospital Pvt ltd. here at Balikuda under the supervision of plastic surgeon Bibhuti Bhusan Nayak.

A trendsetter in micro-vascular surgeries in Odisha, 48-year-old Nayak claims to have so far performed over 5,000 cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries.

“Proper palatal repair at appropriate time and correct post-operative managements will rectify all speech problems, and these special children will definitely chase their dreams to be good orators or even singers,” Dr Nayak says.

Cleft lip surgery at the age of three months and cleft palate surgery at the age of nine months are said to be ideal, Nayak says, adding that most parents fail to identify the soft palate deformity of their children at this age, leading to major complications as they grow up.

“With support from the Smile Train programme, our hospital has already performed nearly 350 lip and palate surgical corrections free of cost in the past one year by not only bringing smile to these children but restoring smiles on the faces of their parents,” Dr Nayak said.