When Nirmala Sitharaman was elected as India’s latest Defence Minister, there was a lot of reason for me to feel really happy and hopeful. This was a new India, one that was accepting the fact that its women have always been as capable, if not better, of getting a job done as their male counterparts.
This is not a competition, but when it comes to talking about the things women are doing today that they were not able to do, say about 20 years back, there’s much cause to feel happy at the changes.
Times are changing, yes, and a lot is changing at the work front for women.
India’s first defence minister
Image Credit: ANI.
Let’s just take a moment to feel proud about this. Come to think of it, a woman is the main binding force in a family, the one who will do anything to keep her children and her family safe, and finally, India gets its first full-fledged woman defence minister in the year 2017. After taking the oath, she went on to say, “Somebody who has come from a small town, grown into the party with all the support of the leadership, and if given such responsibility, it just makes you feel sometimes that cosmic grace is there.”
Fly the Fighter Jet MiG-21 Bison
Image Credit: darpanmagazine
24 year old Flying Officer Avani Chaturvedi wrote history when she became the first Indian woman fighter pilot who flew solo. She flew the MiG-21 Bison at the Jamnagar airbase in Gujarat. The MiG-21 Bison is known to have the highest landing and take-off speed in the world. Once she completes her stage 3 training next year at Bidar in Karnataka, she will be able to fly other fighter jets such as the Sukhoi and Tejas.
Driving a passenger train
Image Credit: beaninspirer, hindustantimes
Surekha Yadav, who is now all of 51, has been in the Indian Railways for a long and fulfilling career span of almost 30 years now, but it was not until 1998 that she really became a full-fledged train driver. From driving goods carriages to local trains and passenger trains, she has seen and done all that there is in this field.
She was born to farmer parents in Satara, a small village in Maharashtra and got her diploma in Electrical Engineering. Remembering the time when she casually filed the Indian Railways form and decided to give a try at the written exams, she says that she was the only female who was there at the written as well as in the viva exams, and was not aware that till then, women had not worked in the Indian Railways in the role of a train driver. She felt that someone had to take the first step and create that balance, and she saw it as her chance to do something for her country, for her family, and for herself.
To space and beyond
Image Credit: cloudfront
Most of us still remember the moment when the space shuttle Columbia, carrying Indian-origin American astronaut Kalpana Chawla and her crewmates, was entering the earth’s atmosphere. As the shuttle disintegrated in an unfortunate turn of events, people around the world mourned the loss. Kalpana Chawla is also the second Indian after Rakesh Sharma who ever travelled into space. She went for her first space mission on 19th November 1997.
As Kalpana Chawla said while she travelled in the weightlessness of space, “You are just your intelligence,” it’s not about gender power, it’s about who you are and what you do in your life, whether man or woman, that matters.
Lighting the funeral pyre
Image Credit: livemint
While this is not a ‘job’ we thought it should feature in this list because it is a ground-breaking thing for Indian Hindu rituals nonetheless. Hindu traditions call for only sons or male members of a family to light the funeral pyre of the deceased, but Pankaja Munde, daughter of late Gopinath Munde, Union Minister for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, brought a shift in the gender questions in Indian culture, when she lit her father’s pyre in front of some of the biggest political names in India. If we take the latest incident that the nation has been witness to, Sridevi’s daughters Jhanvi and Khushi lit her funeral pyre. In an older incident in UP, 2 girls lit their father’s funeral pyre after he succumbed to illness. The girls said their father had never discriminated against boys and girls, and so they would rightfully bid him farewell.
Yes, times are changing, but honestly, we don’t want to wait for another 20 years to see some big changes in our gender equations.
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