Skip to main content

Malala – daring to dream


With the American first family - Exactly a year ago 
Malala Yousafzai is a symbol of human aspirations.  What did she want apart from the simple things of life?  Nothing.  She wanted education, freedom to live her life as she would choose, and the space to dream.  Why didn’t people give her that? 

When she was shot point-blank as she was returning home from school, it was the innocence and aspirations of childhood that was assaulted.  Malala was just 15 years old when she became the target of religious fundamentalists.  She was a child.  Why would a child be a threat to any religion?  What kind of a religion is it that permits the murder of innocent children?  The masked Taliban gunman who attacked Malala asked, “"Which one of you is Malala? Speak up, otherwise I will shoot you all."  His religious fervour was such that he could kill a whole lot of innocent school children.  No normal human being can understand the relevance or meaning of such a religion.

“I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taleban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid of going to school because the Taleban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools.”  Malala wrote that in her BBC blog on 3 Jan 2009, three years before she was attacked by the Taliban. 


A girl who wishes to study, a child who wants to have dreams and not nightmares – that was Malala.  That is Malala.  She is a symbol of the dreams of every child.  The Nobel Prize Committee has done the right thing to honour her with the award.  It has drawn the attention of the world to a serious issue: the child’s right to dream.  

Comments

  1. And that too a little girl. She started writing as a little girl, I mean. Even 17 is not much of an age given her status now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very true sir, She is a true inspiration to girls and she showed her women power or dedication towards studies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. She has become a mascot for the West against a certain kind of religion. But I'm not worried about the politics behind it.

      Delete
  3. yes, but still,I do not think she deserves a Noble prize. There are many unsung heroes who do rather this girl who has recv more applauds than she actually deserves.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air," as Thomas Grey sang. We had never heard of Kailash Satyarti until the Nobel committee discovered him. Malala is a young girl whose spirit (mettle) deserves recognition.

      Malala's case is not just about a blog or what she writes. It is about a whole lot of people suppressed and oppressed in the name of religion. The Prize draws the world's attention to that problem. That's important.

      Delete
  4. Talking about dream. It did remind me of my dream yesterday. I was reading khaled hosseini's novel "A Thousand Splendid Suns" and didn't realise when I slept and ended up dreaming. It was scary. With all the Taliban attacks happening all over, I was scared to death. It wasn't less than a nightmare. It took me 15 minutes to get back to the reality of life. A dream left such an impact on me, imagine kids facing that everyday. They never ask for much. All they need is a place to learn and a place to play. Education is the right of every child. Malala is sure a symbol of dreams of every child.
    Nice read :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Life in all the Muslim countries where Taliban and the like (IS, for example) are active is a nightmare. 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' shows one part of the picture. The actual picture is much worse. Hence the greater relevance of dreams. The greater need to probe into what the militant and fundamentalist organisations are doing. Malala's service is of much value in this regard.

      Delete
  5. True example and inspiration for woman power!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...