This books reveals a lot more than what we know. For instance, I knew that Malala became famous only because she as a girl used to go to School even after Talibans had put a ban on the same and then they shot her. Wrong. She became a social activist much before she was shot. She received many accolades for her work in girl’s education in her area Swat valley and other backward regions of Pakistan.
On 9th October 2012, she was shot at point blank range by a person from Taliban, when she was returning from her school on a school bus. Luckily the shots were not well targeted, her friend also was injured. The quick thinking of the driver of the bus, did all the good to Malala and saved her life but the irony of life is that the government has kept him in house arrest for questioning for years now!
Today she is coined as the most famous teenager in the world, yes more than Justin Bieber.
In the book she talks about her life in her village and difficult it was for her family to feed them all, how her father has always been a social worker, always cared for the well being of the people living there, how her mother has always been the care taker for anyone who comes to her door for food or shelter, how she describes that her house has always been full with some family or the other whom her mother was helping, how her father’s efforts to start a school and run it successfully in a Taliban affected region always pushed him to almost lose the spirit and close the school but how he could still continue and sustain and last but not the least her continuous urge to come first in her class defeating her own best friend. Well after all she is just a regular teenager!
You may have read but Malala clearly describes how Taliban used to bomb schools in that area of Pakistan. There were just against it. They must have bombed more than hundreds of schools in the Swat disctrict alone! Yes, they would just drop a bomb at these schools to bring the entire structure to rubbles. Malala was just 11 years old when she agreed to write a diary (helped by a elderly) for BBC News which talked about the life of a school girl in the region. Of course coming up openly was very risky hence she was named Gul Makai (you guess it, it means cornflower).
She even appeared in an New York Times documentary they did on Malala and her father and the life during those times. here’s that video:
The books talks a lot about her and family’s struggle throughout their lives, even after she was shot there was politics involved in getting her to England for a better treatment, but all went well in the end.
12th July, her birthday, was dubbed as Malala Day by the United Nations. She currently lives in England with her family. She was nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace prize but did not win, She has again been nominated this year. TIME magazine had put her on the cover of the April edition and also termed her as the 100 most influential person in the world.
In her own words, as she spoke in the UN last year, “Malala day is not my day. Today is the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights”
Amen to that. You can but this book on Amazon or Flipkart.