Fab Female Role Model No. 9: Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things.

Roy was born in Shillong,Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother and a Bengale Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Aymanam, in Kerala, schooling in Corpus Christi. She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard Da Cunha.

The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. Since winning the Booker Prize, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization / alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo -imperialism.

In response to India's testing of nuclear weapons in Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination, a critique of the Indian government's nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living, in which she also crusaded against India's massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of India. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays as well as working for social causes.

Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

In June 2005 she took part in theWorld Tribunal on Iraq. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays, 'The Algebra of Infinite Justice', but declined to accept it.

Fab Female Role Model no. 8: Sarah Chayes

Afghanistan -- In a city where women are rarely seen, never mind heard, Sarah Chayes talks tough politics with rough men, drives her own car, and keeps a gun under her bed.

''It's a Kalashnikov. I've never had to use it except for a little target practice," she says.

The macho image has helped the impassioned campaigner -- a self-described idealist from an accomplished Cambridge family steeped in academia and government service -- to carve out a role for herself in the troubled landscape of southern Afghanistan.

Since completing a tour as a reporter for National Public Radio in 2002, Chayes, 44, has made a home in Kandahar, became fluent in Pashto, one of the main Afghan languages, and devoted her energies to rebuilding a country gutted by two decades of war -- a unique mission for an American in a conservative city that was once the headquarters of Taliban rule.

She has helped rebuild homes and set up a dairy cooperative. Her latest venture involves encouraging farmers to grow roses instead of opium poppy.

Yet lately her enthusiasm has dissolved into disillusionment with the US-supported new order, which she describes as discredited, corrupt, and infected with drug money. But her biggest disappointment is President Hamid Karzai.

''I once believed passionately in President Karzai and his family. Not any more," Chayes, a talkative, tall woman with striking green eyes, said during a recent interview at her Kandahar office.

The same Taliban warlords who presided over the destruction of Afghanistan have been allowed return to power, she says, and the US-backed regime is fast losing legitimacy. For Chayes, a moment of truth came nearly one year ago with the death of a close friend, Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal, the burly former police chief of Kandahar.

The two were unlikely buddies. They met shortly after Chayes arrived in Kandahar, when Khakrezwal tried to expel her from the city, claiming foreigners were not allowed to live there without official permission -- and was astonished at her stubborn refusals. But after several chats, they discovered they shared many ideas about the shape of the new Afghanistan.

''He was the most gifted public official I have known -- unerringly sophisticated and always trying to turn things for the better," Chayes said fondly, hooking a thumb toward a picture of Khakrezwal on the wall of her office, a discreet one-story building in a residential neighborhood.

Last June, he and 19 others were killed when a bomb ripped through a Kandahar mosque during a prayer service. Although government officials blamed the explosion on a suicide bomber, Chayes conducted her own investigation and concluded her friend was assassinated by a device planted at the behest of agents working for neighboring Pakistan, which many Afghans believe is continuing a decades-old policy of meddling in their affairs -- an allegation Pakistani officials strenuously deny.

The killing is the opening scene of her book ''Punishment of Virtue," to be published in August by Penguin Press. She describes the book as a mix of history and contemporary reporting and as ''an ant's view of how things developed after the fall of the Taliban in 2001."

Activism runs in Chayes's blood. Her father, Abram Chayes, was a legal adviser in the Kennedy administration and a distinguished law professor at Harvard. He died in 2000. Her mother, Antonia, served as undersecretary of the Air Force during the Carter administration and currently teaches at Tufts University.

That record of public service inspired Chayes to pursue journalism, and then nation-building.

After graduating from Harvard and spending two years in the Peace Corps in Morocco, she returned to Harvard to study for a graduate degree in Islamic history, but she struggled in academia, and became a researcher for Christian Science Monitor Broadcasting in Boston.

She reported for National Public Radio from 1997 until June 2001 from her base in Paris, and then agreed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks to take on a three-month assignment for NPR covering the war in Afghanistan. She made her way to Kandahar, and lived with a family to be closer to the lives of ordinary Afghans. And still she was frustrated. As the US-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan abated, and the extremists melted into the countryside, she found it was more fulfilling to become part of the story instead of reporting it.

''Four and a half minutes [her longest report on NPR] can't convey much," she said. ''You want to roll up your sleeves and see if you can do it yourself."

There was plenty to do in Kandahar, a city of high-walled houses on the edge of a parched desert plain that has played a pivotal role in Afghan history for centuries.

With the encouragement of Azizullah Karzai, an uncle of President Karzai, Chayes collected money in the United States, established an aid agency to fund rebuilding projects, and set about repairing a bombed-out village on the outskirts of Kandahar. She also became something of a curiosity in a city where most women slip silently through the streets covered in powder-blue burkas.

Even now, she says with a smile, stallholders in the bazaar whisper among themselves ''Who is this animal?" when she passes, dressed in pants and a long-sleeve top. ''Then I reply in Pashto, and everyone laughs," she said.

''I don't back down easily," Chayes said. ''I think that wins me some respect."

It has also won her some enemies. Last year, Chayes found a bomb in a drain outside her front gate. The device didn't explode but the message was clear: Stay quiet.

Since arriving in Kandahar, Chayes has waded deep into the murky waters of local politics, criticizing the policies and conduct of such powerful figures as Gul Agha Sherzai, a onetime warlord who was appointed governor of Kandahar after 2001. Afghan critics say she has meddled in areas that are none of her business.

President Karzai moved Sherzai to Nangarhar Province in June 2005, but Chayes says that Kandahar politics is still rife with unsavory characters, some related to Karzai. So now she has turned to business to make a difference.

In May 2005, Chayes set up the Arghand cooperative (www.arghand.org), a privately funded venture that buys products from local farmers and turns them into seven varieties of soaps. The scents are extracted from roses, wild apricots, pomegranate seeds, and various herbs. The hand-molded soaps resemble lumps of polished marbles and reflect the rich terrain of southern Afghanistan.

''The fruit in this area has such mystique," she said. ''The 11th century Persian poetry talks of the pomegranates of Kandahar."

The project is funded with about $70,000 in private donations from across the United States. A lawyer in San Francisco gave $15,000; smaller amounts came from donors in Massachusetts towns including Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington, she said.

Chayes admits that the many hurdles of running an export business from a war-ravaged city make her venture quixotic. The soaps, which retail for $6 each, are shipped from the local US military base, and she relies on volunteers to find buyers in the United States. In the Boston area the soaps are stocked at Essentia in Wellesley.

And achieving the project's principal goal -- weaning frightened, poverty-stricken Afghans off poppy, the crop used to make heroin -- is not easy. The handful of farmers who grow roses for the cooperative live in Panjwayi, 20 minutes from Kandahar and the scene of a major Taliban battle three weeks ago. It is so dangerous that Chayes dares not visit.

But she insists that small starts can make a big difference. ''This is the only way to beat heroin," she said. ''We have to re-weave the economic fabric of the country so that people will have too much to lose from a return to war."

Chayes dreams of the day when Kandahar's citizens will reclaim their city from the extremists now threatening it. ''This could be a beacon for this country, if it were turned around," she said.

Fab Female Role Model No. 7: Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori (August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician, educator, philosopher, humanitarian and devout Catholic; she is best known for her philosophy and the Montessori method of education of children from birth to adolescence. Her educational method is in use today in a number of public as well as private schools throughout the world.

Maria Montessori was born in Italy to Alessandro Montessori, and Renilde Stoppani. At the age of thirteen she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dreams of becoming an engineer. Montessori was the first woman to graduate from the University of La Sapienza Medical School, becoming the first female doctor in Italy. She was a member of the University's Psychiatric Clinic and became intrigued with trying to educate the "mentally retarded or "unhappy little ones" and the "uneducatable" in Rome. In 1896, she gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Torino about the training of the disabled. The Italian Minister of Education was in attendance, and was impressed by her arguments sufficiently to appoint her the same year as director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of the mentally retarded. She accepted, in order to put her theories to proof. Her first notable success was to have several of her 8 year old students apply to take the State examinations for reading and writing. The "defective" children not only passed, but had above-average scores, an achievement described as "the first Montessori miracle." Montessori's response to their success was "if mentally disabled children could be brought to the level of normal children then (she) wanted to study the potential of 'normal' children".

“Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society”.

Because of her success with these children, she was asked to start a school for children in a housing project in Rome, which opened on January 6, 1907, and which she called "Casa dei Bambini" or Children's House. Children's House was a child care center in an apartment building in the poor neighborhood of Rome. She was focused on teaching the students ways to develop their own skills at a pace they set, which was a principle Montessori called "spontaneous self-development". A wide variety of special equipment of increasing complexity is used to help direct the interests of the child and hasten development. When a child is ready to learn new and more difficult tasks, the teacher guides the child’s first endeavors in order to avoid wasted effort and the learning of wrong habits; otherwise the child learns alone. It has been reported that the Montessori method of teaching has enabled children to learn to read and write much more quickly and with greater facility than has otherwise been possible. The Montessori Method of teaching concentrates on quality rather than quantity. The success of this school sparked the opening of many more, and a worldwide interest in Montessori's methods of education.

After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in Rome, by 1913 there was an intense interest in her method in North America, which later waned. (Nancy Rambusch revived the method in America by establishing the american Montessori Society in 1960). Montessori was exiled by Mussolini mostly because she refused to compromise her principles and make the children into soldiers. She moved to Spain and lived there until 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. She then moved to the Netherlands until 1939.

In the year 1939, the Theosophical Society of India extended an invitation asking Maria Montessori to visit India. She accepted the invitation and reached India the very same year accompanied by her only son,Mario Montessori Sr. This heralded the beginning of her special relationship with India. She made Adyar, Chennai her home. However the war forced her to extend her stay in India. With the help of her son, Mario, she conducted sixteen batches of courses called the Indian Montessori training Courses. These courses laid a strong foundation for the Montessori Movement in India. In 1949 when she left for The Netherlands she appointed Albert Joosten as her personal representative, and assigned him the responsibility of conducting the Indian Montessori Training Courses. Joosten along with Swamy S r, another disciple of Dr. Maria Montessori, continued the good work and ensured that the Montessori Movement in India was on a sound footing.

During a teachers conference in India she was interned by the authorities and lived there for the duration of the war. Montessori lived out the remainder of her life in the Netherlands, which now hosts the headquarters of the AMI, or Association Montessori Internationale. She died in Noordwijk aan zee. Her son Mario headed the AMI until his death in 1982.

Maria Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952, after a lifetime devoted to the study of child development. Her early work centered on women’s rights and social reform and evolved to encompass a totally innovative approach to education. Her success in Italy led to international recognition, and for over 40 years she traveled all over the world, lecturing, writing and establishing training programs. In later years, ‘Educate for Peace’ became a guiding principle, which underpinned her work.