I was on an official tour in Delhi. Post a hectic day at work, was shifting news channels on TV before I finally got off to sleep. That’s when I heard her speak. The Nobel Peace Price has just been announced.  Conferred jointly, to 60 year old Kailash Satyarthi of India and 17 year old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan.

I put down the TV remote, awe struck as she spoke with such effect and simple vision. Her self-confidence could inspire and instil faith in grown-ups.

While returning back from Delhi, saw her again, looking out of a book cover, in the best seller section. Her eyes said something powerful and deep, akin to some God-man with a blissful half-smile. Instinctively, I picked up the book, paid for it and started reading as soon as I was settled in the waiting area.

Thereafter, I travelled far away to the pristine world of the Swat valley to be amongst a warm and loving Pashtun family. Every page was inspiring and urging you to do something, as the beautiful valley transformed before my eyes from a place of tourism to a centre of barbaric terrorism.

Malala’s clarity of thought and vision combined with her stubbornness and perseverance to bring in change, dwarfs out your own sense of achievements and our daily life’s mundane challenges. Yet, she retains the simplicity of a child and her girl-like desire for clothes and ornaments.

Malala – the girl child, stands as a stark contrast to Malala – the crusader for right to education. Perhaps, it’s her overpowering and strong desire to read and learn and her possessiveness of her books that drives her to face up to a bad world of fundamentalists who spread terror, suspicious army-men and politicians who are ineffective.

You read about her and start believing that she is destined for greater things. Will she be the future PM of Pakistan?  Can she transform the world and the region? Will she make her generation the last generation to see children being denied school? Perhaps she will. There lies hope. Almost a God-man like faith & believe develops. She was shot in the head at point blank range and some bone was strong and curvy enough to deflect the bullet. She came back from death and traversed an extraordinary journey from the remote valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the halls of the United Nations in New York. Nations from the UAE to the UK came together to save her life.

Her parent’s unrelenting love for their daughter and her father allowing her to fly her way and high away, makes for a remarkable story in a society where daughters are given the least importance and largely ignored and made to do house work, least at all take her cause to the media and to the world.

As you finish the book, you hope against hope that someday Malala’s & her uprooted family and those of many others are able to return to their home land.

“Who is Malala?” the gunman had demanded. Now, the world knows who is she and what is her campaign. As she says, “The voice grows louder. It’s time the world things bigger.”

Go ahead and pick-up the book! And if you are more of the audio-visual types, below is a collection of some YouTube videos…

Her Miraculous Story of surviving, post being shot in the head…: http://youtu.be/CXvs1vwiD0M

Girl Shot in Head by Taliban, Speaks at UN: Malal…: http://youtu.be/QRh_30C8l6Y

Malala Yousafzai post being chosen as a Nobel laureate in Birmingham, UK: http://youtu.be/66tIRTm91F8

Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: http://youtu.be/MOqIotJrFVM

 

After you watch them, it will make you pick up the book for sure J

 

© Sanchayan Paul