It was thirty years ago today that Neerja Bhanot won India’s highest honor for bravery in peacetime, the Ashoka Chakra Award when her jetliner, Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to the US, was hijacked by terrorists from Abu Nidal, who were specifically targeting Americans.
Wikipedia takes up the story:
After 17 hours, the hijackers opened fire and set off explosives. Neerja Bhanot opened one of the doors. Although she could have been the first to jump out of the aircraft and flee to safety when she opened the door, she decided not to and instead started helping the other passengers to escape. Neerja was shot while shielding three unaccompanied American children from a hail of bullets of the hijackers. Out of a total of 41 American passengers, two were killed during the hijacking. A child on board, then aged seven, is now a captain for a major airline and has stated that Neerja Bhanot has been his inspiration and he owes every day of his life to her.
I’m including the story partly due to its historical value…
…and partly to counter the notion that the cultural left continues to push – the idea that the individual is helpless in the face of adversity, to say nothing of aggression, without “the village” – the suffocating fog of government there to protect and validate them. This thesis is trashed on a nearly-daily basis. Faced with imponderable evil, against the most daunting odds, ordinary people do the most extraordinary things. To attempt to has always been considered one of the greatest virtues of mankind.
And I’m here, in part, to keep reminding you of that.
So that, more importantly, you can remind others of that.
DG,
Since you have not seen fit to obey my request, I’m not going to publish your comment.
But:
“You left out that she was an adamant feminist — you know, one of those women you denigrate.”
Wrong, as always.
DG, the women in my family make “feminists” like you look like the yapping puppies you all really are. You couldn’t have carried my paternal grandmother’s gig bag.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
BTW – being a feminist in Hindi culture thirty years ago was a lot different than being one of the entitled, smug “feminists” that clog our academy and non-profit sector. That you don’t see the difference – you choose to ignore it illustrates your fatal myopia.
How could she have been a feminist? She saved lives instead of insisting on government funding for Planned Parenthood, after all.
Seriously, she could have had a touch of feminism, and given that it’s claimed her husband starved and isolated her while demanding ever more dowry money from her family, I can’t blame her if she turned against the institution of arranged marriage and the like while working to provide for herself. But we’re not talking Gloria Steinem territory here by any stretch of the imagination.
One other thing I need to say here; she was beautiful, and had the love in her heart to die for people she didn’t even know. Her ex-husband had one of the greatest joys of life in his arms, and he threw it away by starving her and demanding more dowry money, as if that can make up for a lack of marital bliss that he could have had with her.
Moron of the millenium.