Career
Neerja Bhanot was the senior flight purser on the ill-fated Pan Am Flight 73, hijacked by four heavily armed terrorists after it landed at Karachi at 5 am from Mumbai. PA 73 was en route to Frankfurt and onward to New York City. Neerja alerted the cockpit crew about the hijack and, as the plane was on the tarmac, the three-member cockpit crew of pilot, co-pilot and the flight engineer were able to flee from the aircraft. Neerja, being the most senior cabin crew member on board, took charge.
The hijackers were part of the Palestinian Abu Nidal terrorist organization and were backed by Libya. They immediately shot dead a passenger who identified himself to the terrorists as being an American. The terrorists then instructed Neerja to get the passports collected of all the passengers, so that they could identify the Americans. Neerja, and the other attendants under her charge, hid the passports of the 40 Americans on board.
After 17 hours, the hijackers opened fire and set off explosives. Neerja opened the emergency door and helped a number of passengers escape. She did not herself escape, and became martyr while shielding 3 children from a hail of bullets. Neerja was recognised internationally as "the heroine of the hijack" and is the youngest recipient of the Ashoka Chakra, India's highest civilian award for bravery.
Read more about this topic: Neerja Bhanot
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)