What did kalpana chawla do against her father's opposition?

Answer 1

Kalpana Chawla was born in Karnal, India, in 1961, the youngest of the four children of Banarsi Lal Chawla and Sanjogta Kharbanda. Both of them had the childhood experience of fleeing their homes during the late 1940s when India was torn apart by the struggle between Hindus and Muslims following the country's independence from Britain on August 15, 1947. Chawla's father himself narrowly escaped with his life, and eventually settled with his extended family far away from their ancestral village. Kharbanda was the daughter of a doctor. Her father eventually established a successful tire manufacturing business. The couple had daughters Sunita, and Deepa, then son, Sanjay, before their youngest daughter was born. Chawla, like her siblings, was an above-average student while attending the Tagore Bal Niketan Senior Secondary School in Karnal from which she graduated among the top five students in 1976. Chawla's mother told Darryl Fears for an article in the Washington Post that her daughter "was different." "She used to cut her own hair, never wore ironed clothes, learned karate." One of her teachers recounted a project she had done on the environment, making "huge, colorful charts and models depicting the sky and stars." From her earliest childhood, she and her brother shared an interest in flying--something that he would have to give up eventually due to medical concerns.

When she announced to her father that she wanted to study aerospace engineering in college, he told her she should study to be a doctor or teacher, "a more respectable profession," according to Michael Cabbage, writing a biography on the astronaut for the Orlando Sentinel. He would not accompany her to her interview, leaving that task to her mother. Undeterred by a male professor, who told her that engineering was "unladylike," Chawla obtained a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Punjab Engineering College in India, in 1982. Though her father had hoped she and Sanjay would join him in the tire business, Chawla had other ideas. She was at the top of her class in engineering at the university and had been offered a job in her own college--but was accepted at the University of Texas for a master's also in aeronautical engineering. Because her father was traveling for his business at the time and no one but he could make the decision, Chawla took the teaching position. She had already attempted to go to flight school when her brother went but was unable to join the class without the consent of her father. When her father refused, her brother offered the advice that she must fight her own battles.

In his story to Josy Joseph for the web news organization, The Rediff Special, Chawla's father told the story of how he first discovered his daughter's wish was to go to America to study. "I returned after two months and reach Karnal late one evening. Kalpana was supposed to be home, but she wasn't. I asked about her. She is in Chandigarh, I was told. And then, someone said, 'Anyway why are you asking? You don't have time for her.' " he recalled after his daughter's death. When it set off a family revolt in a family whose wife and daughters were more liberal than the average woman of his community, he went to see Chawla who had already started her teaching position. The August 31 deadline for admission to Texas was fast approaching, only five days away. Determined to go when she could earn the money in another year, she was angry at her father for "destroying" her career. Then he told her that he was willing to provide the money for her, managing to call in some favors and get her a passport in only one day, and arrange for a visa the next. Only two days later, Chawla was ready to get on a flight for Texas with her brother when it was first delayed, and then canceled. She was able to arrange to be admitted late, with the university picking up her and her brother at the airport.