Anna Murray-Douglass

#59/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Anna Murray Douglass is best known as the first wife of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Her life was immensely overshadowed by her husband who was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, and statesman gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings; and illustrates the challenges facing women who were married to famous men.

Anna Murray was born in Denton, Maryland, to Bambarra and Mary Murray. Unlike her seven older brothers and sisters, who were born in slavery, Anna Murray and her younger four siblings were born emancipated, her parents having been manumitted just a month before her birth. A resourceful young woman, by the age of 17 she had established herself as a laundress and housekeeper and later became very wealthy. Her laundry work took her to the docks, where she met Frederick Douglass, then known as Frederick Washington Bailey, a slave working as a caulker. He was six years her junior. (Because I’m focusing on his wife, I’m not going to talk in detail about Frederick’s truly amazing and influential life and work on behalf of abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. However, if you aren’t familiar with his life, please check out his page on Wikipedia. He was a powerful, eloquent writer and speaker who could cut straight to the heart of a matter without hyperbole one minute and wax lyrically eloquent the next. It was truly amazing how he had educated himself while being a slave.)

Anna’s freedom made Frederick believe in the possibility of his own. When he decided to escape slavery again in 1838 (his third attempt after two failed ones), Anna encouraged and helped him by providing him with some sailor’s clothing her laundry work gave her access to. She also gave him part of her savings, which she augmented by selling one of her feather beds. After Frederick had made his way to Philadelphia and then New York, he wrote to Anna to join him. Anna did follow him, bringing enough goods with her to be able to start a household. They were married on September 15, 1838. At first they took Johnson as their name, but upon moving to New Bedford, Massachusetts, they adopted Douglass as their married name.

Over the remaining years of her life, Anna Murray-Douglass helped support the family financially, working as a laundress and learning to make shoes, as Douglass’s income from his speeches was sporadic and the family was struggling. She also took an active role in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and later prevailed upon her husband to train their sons as typesetters for his abolitionist newspaper, North Star. After the family moved to Rochester, New York, she established a headquarters for the Underground Railroad* from her home, providing food, board and clean linen for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada.

The first years of the marriage appear to have been congenial. Anna bore four children—Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Charles Remond, and Frederick Douglass Jr.—during their residence in New Bedford. While Douglass searched for jobs on the city’s docks, Anna kept house on a small budget. When the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, she also took in piecework from the local shoe factories and saved everything that her husband sent to her while he toured for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Strain began to manifest in the Douglass marriage once Frederick became involved in the abolitionist movement. He spent a good deal of time away from home giving lectures, including two years in Europe. Most of his white associates expressed disdain for his wife, at their most generous referring to Anna as a poor intellectual match for her husband, and treated her like a servant in her own home. They, like historians, had focused on Anna’s illiteracy and stoicism to bolster their arguments. Anna, however, had little time for intellectual pursuits while running a household and raising a family with little help from her husband.

By the late 1840s Anna lost much of her emotional support system. Her daughter, Rosetta, was away at school in Albany, New York; and her friend and household helper, Harriet Bailey, had married and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, her husband toured England, where rumors spread about the attention lavished on him by the English ladies. After his return in 1847 Douglass moved the family to Rochester, New York, taking Anna away from the small but active black community of which she had been a part in Lynn. Shortly thereafter she suffered the indignity of having the British reformer Julia Griffiths move into the Douglass home, which caused a storm of controversy alleging Frederick’s infidelity with Griffiths. The departure of Griffiths was followed by the arrival of Ottilie Assing, who installed herself in the Douglass home for several months out of the year over the next twenty years. For much of her life Anna lived isolated from supportive African American companionship while hosting a string of white abolitionists who could barely conceal their disdain for her. Only the extended stays of Rosetta and her children and the companionship of Louisa Sprague, Rosetta’s sister-in-law who lived in the Douglass home as a housekeeper, relieved Anna’s loneliness.

Nevertheless, Anna understood her husband’s role in fighting slavery and her role as his helpmate. She took pride in her husband’s appearance and accomplishments and in keeping a well-ordered home. She continued to take an active part in operation of the household, even after Douglass had become wealthy enough to hire servants. After Anna’s death her work was informally recognized by black women, who continued to refer to the home at Cedar Hill, Uniontown, D.C., as her home, and by Rosetta, who wrote a memoir of Anna’s life and named her eldest daughter Annie. 

Rosetta’s memoir, “My Mother as I Recall Her”, deserves particular attention as one of the only surviving documents about Anna Murray Douglass. Rosetta celebrated Anna’s work, placing her mother squarely within the nineteenth-century “cult of domesticity”. Rosetta used Anna as a symbol of the equality of black women within that sphere during an era in which black women were portrayed as either the sexually promiscuous “Jezebel” or the maternal caretaker “Mammy” of white families. On the other hand, not only did Anna actively support the end of slavery by aiding her husband’s flight to freedom and allowing him to pursue antislavery work but also she maintained an impeccable home and preserved her own dignity and that of her marriage in the face of white assault. In Rosetta’s narrative Anna emerges as a model of middle-class womanhood.

Frederick Douglass, for his part, recognized the role that Anna played in his life. During his first visit to England he maintained a cordial distance from his enthusiastic female admirers, and he defended his wife when anyone suggested that she was not a fit mate for him. After his return home in 1847 Anna conceived their last child, Annie, and Douglass risked his own arrest to reenter the United States to comfort Anna in the wake of that child’s death ten years later. When Anna died in 1882, he fell into a depression that he described as being the darkest moment of his life. Nevertheless, he seemed less than concerned for Anna’s feelings in bringing into their home two white women with whom he was rumored to be sexually involved. He also married a younger white woman within a year of Anna’s death, much to the chagrin of his family and both the black and white communities.

For much of her life, Anna suffered from various ailments, particularly headaches that made her ill. In her later years she suffered from a stroke that confined her to a wheelchair and her bedroom. In August 1882 she died shortly after having a second stroke. One year after Anna’s death, Frederick remarried. His second wife was Helen Pitts. Their marriage was quite a scandal. Helen was white and twenty years younger than Frederick. His children felt the marriage disrespected their mother. Frederick and Helen’s friends were shocked because they felt the marriage was too sudden and because they were worried about the race and age differences. Helen’s family cut off contact with her altogether, and their local society was appalled that a black man and white woman were married at all. But, to give her her due, without Helen’s emotional support and energy, he might not have escaped the depression that haunted him after Anna’s death.

Anna was initially buried at Graceland Cemetery in Washington, D.C. But the cemetery closed in 1894, and on February 22, 1895, she was moved to Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. Frederick Douglass was buried next to her after his death on February 20, 1895. They were later joined by Helen there.

Her entire life, Anna Murray was overshadowed by the enormous personality of Frederick Douglass. Yet, it is doubtful that Frederick Douglass could have been as successful in his work as he was without the assistance of this feisty woman in his life, his first wife and biggest support for 44 years. She played more of a supporting role in his life than an egalitarian one. Yet, in many ways her role was essential to his success. Without Anna’s financial and homemaking support, he might never have escaped from slavery and he probably would not have been able to pursue his career as a writer and orator. Even though his name is the name history remembers, it’s in part because of Anna that he was able to persevere. Yet, it’s ironical that the most talked about fact about their relationship is the white woman he married after she died.

* The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early-to-mid 19th century, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Prem Mathur

#58/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Long ago there were not that many pilots in India, the reason being women were not encouraged to get in to that field, which was considered as male's domain. But, nowadays numerous Indian women work as pilots both in the private and public airline companies. Initially women were working in the cabin, taking care of the passenger's needs. Today they made a big jump from the cabin to the cockpit. It all started with one Prem Mathur whose continued efforts and passion made her become the first Indian woman commercial pilot in 1951, exactly 4 years after India's freedom from the British. Indeed a great feat in those years of conservatism and restricted movements for Indian women. Above in the Indian sky, woman in the cockpit was unthinkable in the 1940s and 1950s. Certainly in the area of commercial flying Prem Mathur was a trailblazer.

After receiving the pilot's flying license in 1947 from Allahabad Flying Club, her ambition was to join a commercial airliner as a pilot. Incidentally, she was first Indian woman to have received a commercial pilot's license in India. In the initial stages, the results were not encouraging, she kept receiving a barrage of regret letters from the commercial airline companies. The commercial airliners, it is said, did not want to take risk by employing women pilots. Their excuse was the passengers won't be comfortable sitting in the airliner with women in the cockpit. This kind of misconception was very much there and it was rooted in the fact that women won't as quickly respond to emergency situation as men would do. Simply speaking, women pilots were not good enough to handle a real emergency situation that might develop while flying as it was different from handling emergency situation in a simulated environment on the ground.

As for Prem, that was not the end of the world. Now she became even more serious about joining a commercial airliner at any cost and her positive approach coupled with sincere efforts, at last, paid off. Deccan Airways of Hyderabad at the interview asked her all kinds of questions about sophisticated electronic and mechanical control and being knowledgeable as she was, initially she was hired as a co-pilot in 1951; after having won the air race in 1949 conducted by the Aero Club. 

However, the company was reluctant to giver her full command of the cockpit even after fulfillment of the required hours of flying by her. While with Deccan, she had the opportunity to fly distinguished personalities like Lal Bahadur Shastry, Indira Gandhi, Lady Mountbatten etc. A disappointed Prem left the job and later became a pilot of well-known industrialist G. D. Birla's private aircraft and was stationed in Delhi. After a short stint with Mr. Birla, she joined the joined Indian Airlines as a pilot in 1953, the National Domestic Airline came into operation with the amalgamation of many private airlines. On 2nd October 1953, Capt. Prem Mathur started flying as Co-pilot with Indian Airlines and India became the first country in the world to employ a woman as a pilot in their IATA Airline Ltd. Till retirement she had a distinguished carrier with the Indian Airlines.

As a courageous woman, she chased her dream and accomplished her passion.

Source: Google search.

Dr. T. S. Kanaka

#57/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

When Thanjavur Santhanakrishnan Kanaka, more popularly known as T.S. Kanaka, opted for a career in neurosurgery way back in the 1960s, little did she realise that she was embarking on a challenging journey. It was a struggle back then as she broke the male bastion several times over, first as a student and later as a surgeon. “Getting a master's degree in general surgery was not easy for me,” Dr. Kanaka recalls with a sparkle in her eyes. “Women were never admitted to master's programme in general surgery. Two other women had been admitted to the M.S. general surgery simply because they had won the Johnson Medal (the highest recognition for a student at Madras Medical College). While one went on to become an anatomy professor, the other never practised. When I applied for the MS programme, I was told I would never be accepted.”

Kanaka was one of eight children born to Santhanakrishna and Padmavathi in Madras on March 31, 1932. Her father was the Deputy Director of Public Instruction and Principal of Madras Teachers College. Despite an urge to pursue spiritual studies in her early years, she went on to study medicine. Born in an era when women were not even allowed to pursue their studies, the young doctor was taking the bold steps towards getting a master’s degree in surgery. No words can explain her struggle to make her mark in this highly male dominated profession.She once explained in an interview, “I was born along with four sisters and three brothers of which only one sister is alive, apart from me. All of them were highly educated. Given that we belonged to 40s and 50s, it’s a huge thing. My youngest sibling was Amarnath who died at a very young age. He, being the last one, was the dearest to the family. So, I have named this house after him. I didn’t want to get married because I wanted to involve myself completely into my profession. My mother understood my situation and accepted it. But my father, like any other father, wanted to get me married. But you see, back then the crucial decisions of the family belonged to the woman of the family. They appeared as subordinates but always the woman’s words went in the house. These days we are talking about female equality, but back then there was female superiority (she laughed) though it’s all changed now.” 

Known for her passion for academics, Dr. Kanaka embarked on research even as a medical student at MMC. She undertook several research projects during the third and fourth year of MBBS, a rare feat for an undergraduate student. But that did not make her journey any easy. She finally got her way and was admitted to the MS course as the only woman among the eight students. 

Even post her admission into the degree course, she was not given the permission to watch emergencies and her teachers where highly skeptical of giving her the knife or scalpel. The agony did not end there. Every time she wrote the exam the examiner failed her. But she not give up. She passed the MS examination on her sixth attempt by fighting every possible tooth and nail. From here young Dr. Kanaka’s journey took her to serve the Indian Army as an officer-surgical specialist. But unfortunately, due to a prolonged lingering illness she could not pursue the post for long. After her health improvement, she returned back to Madras Medical College and joined the neurosurgical wing, dreaming to become a neurosurgeon. The post of an assistant to a surgeon did not come easily either. She turned lucky when an assistant surgeon had to go on leave for training and she was posted in his place. It was under Dr. A. Venugopal that she formally became a surgeon. Later neurosurgeon Dr. B. Ramamurthy's tutorship helped her hone her skills. Under the guidance and teachings of a few esteemed surgeons who sharpen her skills and knowledge, helped her become the first few women neurosurgeons of the world.

Struggles were aplenty even after this. Her academic papers were scrutinised by fellow researchers in the United States. Today, Dr. Kanaka is among the handful of women neurosurgeons who have set an example for other women. Her favourite subject is deep brain stimulation, and she has presented several papers on it. During her several lecture tours in India, she has impressed upon scientists to develop deep brain stimulation kits locally, but says she has not succeeded. The kit is used in stereotaxic surgeries. “My job is not done until India develops its own kit for cost-effective treatment,” says Dr. Kanaka, who remained single to devote herself to medicine. 

Over the years, her zeal and thirst for the subject have inspired her to conduct comprehensive research in the field of neurosurgery. An expert in the field of brain simulation, Dr. Kanaka has dedicated her entire life to the field of medicine. With many accolades to her credit, the one striking one, is that , she is known to be an active blood donor all her life. She was formerly listed in the Limca Book of Records for the highest number of blood donations by an individual. As of 2004 she was noted to have donated blood 139 times.

By the way, she doesn’t stop there . Her hands are currently full with a pet project of designing an implantable deep brain stimulation kit that would act like a boon for cerebral palsy patients. A humanist at heart, she is also quiet active at Sri Santhanakrishna Padmavathi Health Care & Research Centre, which stands tall on a plot adjoining her home. Named after her parents, the center conducts various talks on health thereby creating awareness on medical problems.

Currently, Dr Kanaka, under her parents’ name, also runs a trust and a healthcare wellness cum research centre near her house at Chromepet in Chennai. When she retired, she wanted to build an old age home with her retirement money. She went for help to HelpAge India. The person said, “You were literally living in your office at the hospital for 40 years now; you cannot run a home. Think of something else.” She kept thinking throughout her train journey back home and that was what served as her Bodhi tree. She established a ‘wellness centre’. She has a clinic where she listens to the problems of the elderly. They have simple problems like memory defects, insomnia, drowsiness, giddiness, fatigue, tremors, unsteady gait, falls, pain, urinary incontinence etc, which seem very unnoticeable problems to the youngsters in their family and the young doctors. They need someone they could talk to about their problems. She’s doing that. Now that she’s in their age she can understand their problems.

Undoubtedly, she is an aspiration for every person and holds a special place in the heart of womanhood. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Maryam Mirzakhani

#56/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, then 37-years-old, a mathematician working at Stanford University, became the first woman, and only woman till date, as well as the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under 40 who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics that hold future promise. She was one of four winners of the Fields medal, which is considered the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel prize. She was named for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems. Her death, on July 14, 2017, due to breast cancer when she was only 40, saddened the entire mathematics community.

Maryam’s work straddled several branches of mathematics. She was intuitive and persistent. She would often take large sheets of paper and draw geometric patterns on them as she thought of the problem, prompting her daughter to think she was “painting again.” Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University remembers that Maryam was a “master of curved spaces.” As he explained in an email, “Everyone knows that the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is a straight line. But if the surface is curved — for example, the surface of a ball or a doughnut — then the shortest distance [along the surface] between two points will also be along a curved path, and can thus be more complicated. Maryam proved many amazing theorems about such shortest paths — called geodesics — on curved surfaces, among many other remarkable results in geometry and beyond. Her work, and the research programmes she started, will have an impact on mathematics and physics for years to come.”

She had an uncanny intuition for geometric problems, Professor Bhargava said, which she would solve through drawings that looked like beautiful doodles “but were in fact profound geometric insights that she would then make rigorous later on.” Maryam was interested in complicated curved surfaces or hyperbolic geometry: for example, studying loops that don’t intersect; probing deeper to answer how many loops, which don’t intersect, are there of less than a given length on a curved surface. She worked with Alex Eskin to find a solution to the problem of understanding the trajectory of a billiard ball as it bounces around a table. In this, she generalised a work done by her doctoral adviser Curtis McMullen of Harvard University, also a Fields medallist.

A consequence of her work was to give an entirely new proof of a conjecture made by leading string theorist Edward Witten (a 1990 Fields medallist). The first proof of this conjecture was given by Maxim Kontsevich in 1992; it was such a difficult thing to prove that this work itself, in part, won him the Fields Medal in 1998. Maryam Mirzakhani’s proof of Witten’s conjecture was by relating it to an “elementary problem of counting the number of geodesics on individual surfaces.” She worked aggressively and went for deep and fundamental problems, never reaching for the “low-hanging fruit.” It was her strong geometric intuition and her fluency in a range of diverse techniques that made it possible for her to tackle these problems. In the words of Professor McMullen, “Maryam was a brilliant mathematician who has left us far too soon, and who will continue to inspire others to follow in her path.”

A tribute on the Stanford University website says she specialised in an area of mathematics that “read like a foreign language to those outside mathematics — moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.” Each of these terms comes with a well-developed theory backing it and Maryam’s work was both breaking new ground and building a bridge across these areas. In an interview to Quanta magazine, her collaborator Professor Eskin said her doctoral thesis was such that you could immediately recognise that it belonged in a textbook.

An Iranian citizen, Maryam Mirzakhani was born on on May 3, 1977 in Tehran where she grew up in the post Iran-Iraq war period, “the lucky generation,” she said in a rare interview she gave to Quanta magazine. Her father Ahmad is an electrical engineer. She attended Farzanegan School there, part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. In 1994, Maryam achieved the gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the first female Iranian student to do so. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals. She obtained her B.Sc. in mathematics in 1999 from the Sharif University of Technology. She then went to the United States for graduate work, earning her Ph.D. in 2004 from Harvard University, where she worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen. Maryam was a 2004 research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University. In 2008, she became a professor at Stanford University.

In 2005, Maryam married Jan Vondrák, a Czech theoretical computer scientist and applied mathematician who currently is an associate professor at Stanford University. They have a daughter named Anahita. Maryam was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. In 2016 the cancer spread to her bone and liver, and she died on July 14, 2017 at the age of 40 at Stanford hospital in Palo Alto, California where she lived with her family. During her lifetime, she had been celebrated with many awards and honours, like, AMS Blumenthal Award 2009; the 2013 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (which is presented every two years by the American Mathematical Society and recognizes an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the preceding six years); the Clay Research Award 2014; and of course the Fields Medal 2014. She was named one of Nature magazine's ten "people who mattered" of 2014. She was invited to be the plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014 and was elected as the foreign associate to the French Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 2015; to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016; and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

A private person, she was known to be humble and creative. Maryam originally dreamed of becoming a writer but then shifted to mathematics. When she was working, she would doodle on sheets of paper and scribble formulas on the edges of her drawings, leading her daughter to describe the work as painting. “We overlapped at Harvard University early in our careers, and became instant friends then… Her work has just been so remarkable then and ever since; it was indeed a great honour for me to receive [the Fields Medal] together with her,” said Professor Bhargava. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Rupan Deol Bajaj

#55/100 in #100extraordinarypeople

KPS Gill, often described as the “Supercop”, passed away recently and all newspapers ran pages and pages of accolades for Mr. Gill, very conveniently ignoring his conviction for sexual harassment in 2005. Rupan Deol Bajaj, a senior IAS officer and his victim, who was the first woman to take a case of sexual harassment to the court in India, was very conveniently forgotten.

While it might be one perspective that women at the highest positions of the bureaucracy are immune from the general drudgery of the Indian legal system, retired senior IAS officer Rupan Deol Bajaj argues that the institutional exploitation is as casual even for women who comprise the topmost gentry. She emphasizes that a woman could be at any position but she still remains a woman. Her story is both of courage and despair. However the bottomline remains that she refused to give up and fought for her dignity till she regained it. On one hand it was a restoration of dignity and justice for Bajaj, on the other hand it was also pivotal in framing of jurisprudence on outraging the modesty of women under the Indian Penal Code, 1860.

Something rather unusual happened in the July of 1988. A high profile case was lodged with the police under the dormant sections 354 (assault or criminal force to a woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. It was a unique case with no precedent.

As the story goes – Ms. Bajaj and her husband, both senior IAS officers, went to a dinner party at one of their colleagues’ place where the hero cop of Punjab insurgency, the Director General of Police, KPS Gill was also present. Now, as was the norm back in the eighties, men and women sat separately in respective semi-circles facing each other.

All of a sudden KPS Gill, unacquainted with the concepts of decency and consent, came to Ms. Bajaj’s seat and put up a finger on her face ordering her to come along. She told him that he was misbehaving but only if he could hear the warning. She stood up to leave and then he slapped on her posterior. All the guests were shocked but Ms. Bajaj was traumatised. And then she realized that the only way of leading a respectable life was to fight against the society where violation of dignity of women was casual.

Thus she filed an FIR with the police. Of course no investigation took place. She then approached the Judicial Magistrate along with her husband Mr.. B.R. Bajaj, a senior I.A.S. officer of the Punjab Cadre, who had filed a complaint in the Court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate for the same offenses, described above against KPS Gill and was a party to the case. The magistrate ordered the investigation against these complaints and Mr. Gill approached the High Court. The High Court quashed the complaints because the Honourable Court thought that it was a trivial offence under Section 95 of the Indian Penal Code not worthy of any prosecution. Woman’s dignity, always trivial! The court also said the offence was unnatural and improbable. What?! Anyway, despite these very interesting observations by the High Court, Ms. Bajaj decided to take the matter to Supreme Court. But she had already lost hope now. Then something extraordinary happened.

The Supreme Court overturned the decision of the lower Court and ruled that the offence of outraging the modesty of women was committed under Sections 354 and 509 of the Indian Penal Code. The problem that occurred was regarding the definition of modesty. The Apex Court referred to various dictionaries where modesty was defined as ‘womanly propriety of behaviour; scrupulous chastity of thought, speech and conduct’ and ‘decorous in manner and conduct; not forward or lewd; shamefast’. Another important case that was referred was State of Punjab v. Major Singh where the accused had fingered a seven and a half month old child and the question was whether she possessed modesty. Here the court held that any act done committed on women which is suggestive of sex would fall under the definition of modesty. Thus the ultimate test for ascertaining whether modesty has been outraged is, is the action of the offender such as could be perceived as one which is capable of shocking the sense of decency of a woman. Thus, in the instant case, because slapping on the posterior has sexual overtones, it clearly falls under the mischief of section 354 of the Indian Penal Code.

The Supreme Court thus ordered the lower court to dispose of the case as per the procedure prescribed by law. And thus started one of the most publicized, high-profile legal cases in India that remained in the media limelight for many years. The case, Rupan Deol Bajaj case or Rupan Deol Bajaj vs KPS Gill case, controvertially came to be known as “The Butt-Slapping Case”. Mr. Gill was convicted in 2005 after seventeen years of the commission of the offence. He was awarded the imprisonment of three months and a fine of Rs. 2,00,000. Ms. Bajaj refused to take the compensation as it cannot recompense her for the ignominy and the trauma she underwent for so much for her life. The imprisonment was subsequently converted into probation. Rupen Deol Bajaj was highly praised in the media for both filing a case against such a powerful officer of police and for refusing to be intimidated. 

Mr. Gill had been awarded Padma Shri in 1989. He was given the award even when he had been booked for trying to outrage her modesty. This was done despite more than 90 IAS officers petitioning the government not to honour a person involved in a molestation case. But then our society has certain criteria for greatness and being a respecter of the rights of their fellow beings is definitely not one of them. In 2010, after the Government's decision to strip police officers convicted of 'moral turpitude' of medals and awards, she demanded that the Government take back the Padma Shri award given to KPS Gill. She wanted the Government to move against Gill in the same manner as it was proceeding against ex-Haryana top cop SPS Rathore, to strip him of his police medal in the aftermath of the Ruchika Girhotra molestation case. Of course, that never happened in the case of the celebrated “Supercop”.

Ms. Bajaj, now retired, recalls her struggle as to how the drawing room discussions were around why a woman would trouble a man for this stature for such a trivial thing. Outraging the modesty of women is one of the most forgivable and forgettable offences in India. Women, be afraid for your modesty, not everyone can keep the courage living for seventeen years. Also rest in peace, Mr. KPS Gill! 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Chhavi Rajawat

#54/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

While most of us lament about the corrupt system and its loopholes impeding our country’s growth, how many of us actually think about taking a lead and dare to give it all up to work at the grass-root level?

Among those few faces who lead our society by example, Chhavi Rajawat, the Sarpanch of Soda village in Rajasthan is a woman who has indeed made a difference. With an excellent academic background including a management degree, Chhavi worked for leading companies but left it all to serve her village. Giving up a promising corporate career, she chose to go back to her ancestral village and run for the election of village Sarpanch.

Chhavi was born in 1977 in Jaipur, Rajasthan. She hails from a small village called Soda in Malpura tehsil, Tonk district. She is an alumnus of Rishi Valley School (Andhra Pradesh), Mayo College Girls School (Ajmer), Lady Shri Ram College (University of Delhi) and has completed her MBA from Balaji Institute Of Modern Management, Pune. After doing her MBA, Chhavi worked for companies such as Times of India, Carlson Group of Hotels, and Airtel, before she realised the need to bring about a change in the grass-root level, if she wants to bring about a real difference. Her decision to contest elections was made after a group of people from her village approached and requested her. Quite naturally, the education and exposure that Chhavi brought along, caught the attention of village residents who voted in her favour. In 2011, all in her early 30s, she went back to her village, Soda, in Rajashthan’s Tonk district to become India’s youngest Sarpanch, the first woman Sarpanch and the only Sarpanch to hold an MBA degree. “As the post of Sarpanch at Soda was reserved for women in 2010, villagers wanted me to contest elections. Since I was regularly visiting Soda, I developed a special affection for them. Owing to my upbringing, I always wanted to payback something to the society. As I decided to leave my corporate career, my parents backed my decision to pursue social work,” she said. She now divides her time between her village, Soda, and Jaipur where she lives with her parents. Since her election as Sarpanch, she has been working to bring better water, solar power, paved roads, toilets and a bank to her village. She rues that the modern-day education system is pushing youngsters towards a rat race, leaving them hardly concerned about the society.

Soda is in a remote corner of Rajasthan where the houses are made of mud, electricity supplies are erratic, literacy levels are below 50 per cent and the fear of drought is never far away. The villagers said there had been no progress since Chhavi's brigadier grandfather, now in his 90s, had served as Sarpanch two decades ago and they wanted someone else in the family to take on the role.

In a span of 4 years since she got elected, Chhavi has worked to ensure regular supply of drinking water in the village households and construction of more than 40 roads. In the small village of the desert state, toilets have been constructed in 800 houses out of the total 900 that exist. She claims to have worked for enhancing electricity supply from four hours in a day in 2010 to 22 hours now. She also got a soft drink company to invest into cleaning a pond, the only source of drinking water in the village. The village of Soda has undergone a radical transformation under her leadership and is popular as one of the finest villages in India. But change did not come easily and she faced many challenges, including no support from the government at times. Despite being an elected representative, Chhavi is not affiliated to any political party. “If India continues to make progress at the same pace as it has for the past 65 years since independence, it just won’t be good enough. We’ll be failing people who dream about having water, electricity, toilets, schools and jobs. I am convinced we can do it differently and do it faster,” Chhavi said in an interview with NDTV.

She is swarmed by villagers as she walks down the road and she greets them by name as they share family news and pepper her with questions about progress on various projects. “Nobody has been able to do what she has done - no other Sarpanch has done as much,” said 30-year-old farmer Jai Singh. “I didn't have a choice,” said a smiling Chhavi, who represented India at a recent UN poverty summit. “The villagers broke all caste, gender and religious barriers to elect me,” she adds, a glamorous 33-year-old whose 10,000 constituents are mostly farmers and labourers largely untouched by the country’s economic boom. Her story reveals the potential of good grassroots leadership in making a difference in a country plagued by corruption and inefficiency.

As she planned an IT centre on the common land of Soda by utilising the central funds, few land grabbers who were eyeing the land, allegedly attacked Chhavi, her father and few others with sticks, iron rods and stones, after which she suffered a fracture and other injuries. However, the entire official machinery did not come to her support here as she was not affiliated to any political party, she says. “Even as I was an elected representative, the previous (Congress) regime did not support my ideas of social welfare and empowering ruralites. Development plans were stalled and the then establishment turned a blind eye on our woes. When I was attacked twice by the unsocial elements who were unhappy by my kind of transparent governance, the police officials did not act on my complaints. As I suffered a fracture, doctors at the local government hospitals refused to issue a medico-legal report (MLR),” she said while alleging that people at various levels connived with those who wanted to encroach land. Chhavi said that she faced the hardships with the active support of her parents and the villagers. However, she said that the support of her village made the government authorities realise the activities of the erring officials and support of the authorities. “It’s a huge opportunity for them to get some skills - there was nothing before,” said teacher Mohammed Sadeek, 25, about the youngsters who are all out in support of the IT centre.

When she constructed a drinking water reservoir that has created a shimmering blue lake in the middle of the village, she got her first taste of the bureaucratic hurdles that have repeatedly thwarted her. “I was told we could not use government machinery to clean up reservoirs. Finally, they (the government) told me to do it on my own,” she said. And that’s what she did - raising money from friends, family and companies to fund many of her projects. A soft drinks company invested Rs. 20 Lakhs in the project.

The Times of India, a leading English newspaper in India, credits her as the changing face of rural Rajasthan. On 25 March 2011, Chhavi Rajawat made a well-received address to delegates at the 11th Infopoverty World Conference held at the United Nations. Chhavi was also honoured by the late President of India APJ Abdul Kalam at the Technology Day function at New Delhi. She was also honoured “Young Indian Leader” by IBNLive.

Determined to bring about a faster and sustainable growth in the society, the young Sarpanch believes that a technology-driven system can be used to the advantage of common people in curbing corruption and maintaining transparency. She has not decided whether she will continue in development work once her five-year terms ends, but she is hoping her example will inspire other educated young people to take time out to serve their communities. “Your roots are your foundation. You have to start at the bottom to make a difference -- and there is so much left to do.”

Chhavi Rajawat is a one-woman whirlwind as she seeks to drag her impoverished ancestral village in the desert state of Rajasthan into the 21st Century. The fact that the denim-clad lady of urban India has heartily been welcomed and accepted at a village where women still veiled their faces in ghoonghat says a lot about our country’s people’s will to walk the path of development. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Note: For an interesting side read, click here.

Dr. Tahani Amer

#53/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Tahani Amer discovered her natural passion and inclination for engineering while watching her father fixing his car’s engine as she sat inside her small Egyptian apartment. While her love of math created a clear path for a mechanical and aerospace engineering future, it was great teachers and her father that encouraged and guided Dr. Amer. In return, she spends a great deal of her time to inspire and challenge young women to reach their potential. Dr. Amer started working at NASA in the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Branch. By working in this branch, she gained valuable experience and fulfilled her dream to work with scientists and researchers in solving real-life problems. She recalls, “It was a real privilege to work with state-of-the-art technology and with researchers who love their work.” Then, she landed an opportunity in one of NASA’s wind tunnels to conduct pressure and thermal sensitive paint experiments in support of the NASA’s aeronautical research efforts. This proved to be a valuable experience from both a theoretical and practical point of view. She has experienced the excitement of working with large CFD computer codes and climbing up the ceiling of a wind tunnel to install a velocity probe. Dr. Amer has invented and patented a system to measure the thermal conductivity of a thin film. This measurement is used in the thermal modeling of several techniques for determining boundary layer transition location on models being tested in wind tunnels. Dr. Amer holds a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, a master’s in aerospace engineering, and a doctoral of engineering from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Tahani Amer is an American Muslim NASA employee who grew up in a suburb of Cairo, Egypt. She had always strived to live by three simple principles: Please God and you will please all. Education is the key to opportunity. Serve others with compassion and kindness. She believd that if one thinks about these principles, it is very simple. You have general guidance about values and ethics from God and his books, self-determination by education, and a sense of social responsibility. She planned on going to medical school in Cairo, Egypt, but changed my major to engineering before starting college because of her life choices. She had gotten married at age 17 and moved to the United States.

Math was her favorite subject. She recognized early on that math provided an opportunity to find new methods for solving problems by using math models. When she came to the U.S. in 1983 and took her first calculus class, she could not speak a word in English, but she still achieved an A in the course. It was then that she knew an engineering career would be an awarding one. She obtained a two-year associate degree in science while taking care of two lovely children. Then, she went back to school to finish her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and went on to earn her master’s in aerospace engineering. Recently, she earned her doctoral in engineering.

She believes that NASA is a soft ‘pillow’ that allows you to dream of the impossible and then work hard to make it a reality. In 1992, during her senior year of college, she started working at NASA on the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) project. By working on this project, she gained valuable experience and fulfilled her dream to work with scientists and researchers solving real-life problems! It was a privilege to work with state-of-the-art technology and with researchers who love their work. Then, she earned the opportunity to work in one of NASA’s wind tunnels to conduct pressure and thermal sensitive paint experiments for NASA’s Aeronautic Research efforts. This proved to be a valuable experience from both a theoretical and practical point of view. She experienced the excitement of working with large CFD computer codes and climbing up the ceiling of a wind tunnel to install a velocity probe. It was great; she felt like a little girl in the ‘candy store’ of NASA. Everything seemed possible. She believes that working at NASA is never boring. She invented and patented a system to measure the thermal conductivity of a thin film. This measurement is used in the thermal modeling of several techniques for determining boundary layer transition location on models being tested in wind tunnels. Currently, she contribute to NASA’s independent assessment process of the Agency’s Programs and Projects by working as a member of the Independent Program Assessment Office (IPAO), part of the Agency’s Office of Evaluation. She works very hard to skillfully execute my assignments and demonstrate managerial skills.

She strives to help and educate others by volunteering my time in community service through NASA programs, such as the “Day of Caring”, Engineering Week, the Speakers Bureau, Diversity Day, and after school science clubs. She spoke on the topic of Women in Islam during the Peace week at Old Dominion University in 2011, and was a guest speaker at the Annual Luncheon for the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) to state representatives, university presidents, and new students. She also chaired the Applied Science Session for the VSGC and the IPAO NASA Program Management Challenge 2011. Her profile is included on one of the NASA Posters for outreach activity for Woman in Aerospace and in a college calculus book. She is also involved in mosque programs for teaching Islamic rules and Arabic to young children. After September 11, she contributed to her community in Hampton Roads, Va., by helping to educate and fill the gap that many Americans have in understanding the religion of Islam. She has given lectures in many churches, universities, and local school systems. She was even interviewed by the local newspaper on this topic. By living according to the aforementioned three principles, she tries to set a daily standard to challenge herself. In the same way, she challenges herself by her work with NASA, stretching her understanding and seeking to improve herself and others through helping NASA.

Source: https://women.nasa.gov/tahani-amer/