NEW DELHI: Eighty-six-year-old Banarasi Lal Chawla vividly recalls the day when he was strewing the ashes of his daughter Kalpana Chawla in the hills of Zion National Park in the US. Unexpectedly, he encountered an American woman sobbing uncontrollably as she also grieved the death of the Indian-American astronaut who was on board space shuttle Columbia when it exploded while returning to the Earth.
“Such was the love people had for her, from Karnal to California, and only after her death I got to know the numerous lives she had touched and inspired. Kalpana was not just my daughter, she was India’s daughter and America’s daughter,” he said.
Using cinematic recreations, along with interviews with her parents and close friends, the life of Kalpana Chawla has come alive in a 45-minute bilingual (English and Hindi) documentary produced by National Geographic as part of its Mega Icons TV series, which was screened at a film festival in Mumbai on Thursday, Nat Geo officials said.
“I want the entire world to benefit from the work done by Kalpana. She inspired people during her lifetime, from schoolchildren in her alma mater Tagore Baal Niketan School in Karnal to college students in her universities or the places where she delivered lectures. The film will inspire future generations to dream big,” Chawla said in an interview.
Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian-origin to fly to space, and in her will she had said that after her demise her ashes be either scattered over the Himalayas or the Zion National Park in Utah.
Born in Karnal in 1962, she was one of the seven crew members who died in the disaster in 2003 when Columbia disintegrated during its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. (AGENCIES)
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