Pray For Malala Yusafzai!

A fourteen year old girl, and she had the courage and the determination to take the dreaded Taliban head on. She started her crusade when she was just eleven and has been taking it forward unceasingly for the last three years. In one of its most cowardly and heinous crimes the Taliban attacked the school girl on October 9, 2012 shooting her in the head and in the neck in a definite bid to kill her. She is Malala Yusafzai from Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan.

Malala has been righteously fighting for the right to education and women’s rights. Feeling suffocated under the oppressive diktats of the Tehrik-i-Taliban in 2008 when the Taliban established its regime in Swat Malala wanted to express her anguish to the world. In was in early 2009 that she started writing in a blog for the BBC under a pseudonym and became an international voice. Later that year the Pakistan Army moved into Swat Valley and pushed the Taliban out. Malala and her family got displaced and separated, but afterwards they were reunited and Malala got back her school too. Malala decided then to disclose her real name in her blog writings thereby becoming a target for the Taliban who always justifies all its acts as necessary by its radical interpretations of the Islam. Intolerance for women along with hatred for India and the US has been the common sentiments of all the militant groups under the Taliban.

At the moment Malala is critical and struggling for life. One bullet has been extricated and the doctors say that next one or two days are going to be crucial. On the auspicious Friday yesterday the whole of Pakistanheld prayers in the mosques for her recovery. Over fifty clerics of Pakistan have issued a Fatwa against the attackers and condemned the Taliban as misusing and misinterpreting the teachings of Islam. President Obama and the world have also condemned the crime as most cowardly and barbaric offering every possible help to Pakistan. Humanity’s enemy and the terror called Taliban said that they will attack Malala again if she survives.

Now is the time for all in Pakistanto come together condemning terror, intolerance and hatred and taking the country to a peaceful and harmonious future. People of India too must learn a few lessons from this as intolerance and divisive sentiments have been on the rise in India too. Taliban like forces of intolerance and oppression have been growing ominously in various pockets of India. Now is the time to say no to intolerance.

The crusading angel must survive and must carry on the movement against terror all across the globe creating in its wake millions of supporters for peace and harmony. Let us pray for the speedy recovery of Malala Yusafzai.

The VIP Brat: A Study in Contrast!

Here we’re talking about only two compartments inside a particular AC 2-Tier coach in a particular daily train under the Indian Railways that departs a particular originating station at around noontime and reaches the destination city early morning the next day. The train is popular because it is superfast and always on time. That fateful noon too, the train was ready for boarding about one hour before departure. We cut to the inside of that particular coach having those two compartments for our contrasting study. Two elderly couples were in a state of considerable distress. One of them, both technically senior citizens, had been allotted two upper berths and the husband was at his wits end how to proceed, because his wife was being taken for check-up after surgeries in both of her knees—she could hardly walk and her climbing up the berth was a sheer impossibility. The husband was also on the wrong side of the sixties, but he thought he could manage the climbing once he managed a ...

Mitali: The Trauma of Losing a Sibling

Maybe I lied to her when I used to reassure her that she was going to be alright and was going to resume her life in some measure of normalcy in the future years; maybe all my gestures/expressions were false when I used to run my fingers across her forehead or embrace her on occasions when she was able to move around a bit; and maybe all my exhibitions of love care and responsibility were exposed as superficial when I failed to turn up in Delhi where she along with my mother were treated during September-October, 2022 (my mother Urmila Chakravarty was also diagnosed with dental cancer the same month the same year as she was) and when all the members of my parental family and the in-laws converged. Since that fateful day in August, 2022 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer to that disastrous day of March 6, 2025—the day my younger blood sister Mitali (Mainu) Chakravarty Sarma (November 2, 1963—March 6, 2025) passed away in the wee hours in a hospital in Guwahati after giving a bra...

Release of Book 'Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories'!

The fourth collection of stories titled 'Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories' by Chinmay Chakravarty has been released on Amazon KDP just now! This collection, short stories in a lighter vein plus with mild satire like the previous collections, has been published in both the E-book and Paperback formats. The links are given below: International: Click Here ! India: Click Here ! Other collections of short stories by the same author: The Cheerless Chauffeur and Other Tales(2021)--Notion Press. Funny and Fishy Tales(2022)--KDP. The Weirdos(2022)--Ukiyoto Publishing. All books of the author are available on Goodreads, apart from Amazon and other outlets! Have a look!