By IANS,
Chandigarh : A Mumbai woman, who walked out of her troubled marriage and now works for women’s empowerment, was selected Tuesday for the 2008 Neerja Bhanot award for showing tremendous courage, compassion and commitment in life.
Chanda Asani, 41, was chosen for the award by the jury of the Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust.
The award is given in the memory of air-hostess Neerja Bhanot, a 23-year old Senior Purser of Pan Am Airways from here, who gave up her life while saving scores of others during a Pan Am plane hijack at Karachi Airport Sep 5, 1986.
For her act of bravery, Neerja became the youngest recipient of the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest civilian award for bravery, in 1987.
The award comprises a reward of Rs.150,000, a citation and a trophy.
Asani was married off at the young age of 15 years but soon found that the man she was married to was having a series of love affairs with other women. Despite having two children, Asani’s husband refused to take care of them.
Asani, who had done her higher secondary, was forced to take up odd jobs to sustain the family. Life was a living hell for her as her husband openly wooed other women.
Chanda did not want to go back to her father as she had three unmarried sisters and was afraid that the social stigma of her broken marriage would reflect on them too.
However, when she was only 23, she took a bold decision and left her husband’s house in Mumbai.
She moved to her father-in-law’s house in Adipur, Kutch-Gujarat, with her two sons but she was not able to live in peace there.
Her husband married another woman in Mumbai. As she and her sons were ridiculed for her husband’s activities in Adipur, she decided to move back to Mumbai.
Determined to change her destiny and not cow down to fate, Asani went back to studying, passed her masters degree in English literature and did a programme on women development studies.
But problems did not end for her. Her health failed her – she underwent a glaucoma operation and was bedridden with arthritis. But she faced the odds, even going to the United States to be a nanny for some time.
But soon she returned to work among women in India.
Since then, the SNDT Women’s University Rural Development Centre in Mumbai has been a part of her life.
Her devotion is towards ‘Kalyani’, a rural women’s co-operative in Kulak village near Udwada in Gujarat, where she coordinated with workers at the grassroots level, arranged non-formal education and training programmes and explored employment opportunities under a sustainable livelihood programme.
When told that she had won the Neerja Bhanot award, Asani had only one thing on her mind – Kalyani.
“The roof of the (Kalyani) centre is in a bad shape and I was not able to get funds for the work. But now I will ask them to find out details of the repairs so that we can start work immediately,” she said.
The Neerja Bhanot Award will be conferred on Asani Oct 5 at a ceremony to be held here, said Aneesh Bhanot, brother of Neerja Bhanot.