Through the Eyes of a Woman

    19-year-old Indian Maitri Patel is an ideal role model for millions of girls because she has reached her goal and the dream of her life. Ever since she saw her first airplane at age 8, she has dreamed of becoming a pilot. Now Maitri has got a commercial pilot’s license, after completing her flight training in a record time of 11 months. She has become India’s youngest commercial pilot. Maitri wanted to become a pilot since childhood and after completing her class XII education from Metas Adventist School, Surat, Gujarat, Maitri went to the United States to complete her pilot training program. Maitri's father Kantilal Patel is a farmer and her mother works in health care. Instead of saving for her wedding, as is often usual in India, Patel’s father invested in her education. He sold a piece of his ancestral land to pay for the flight training course fees Metas Adventist School is an English-language Seventh-day Adventist school that has served Surat since 1942. Its mission

No matter what post I read on Facebook, I always find disgusting, hateful comments in the reactions that violate netiquette. The hatred that is spewed out there scares me. Not because I would feel threatened myself, but because it shows how little respect people have for each other today. All kinds of extremists cavort in social media under the cloak of freedom of expression. In the anonymity of the media, it's easy to condemn, threaten and insult others. I would not like to meet such people in person, but I can hardly protect myself from their statements on the Internet. That doesn't have much to do with freedom of expression, because this kind of behavior violates human dignity, which according to our constitution is inviolable. As Germans, we are generally very careful not to repeat our history. However, the number of anti-Semitic incidents is constantly increasing, and the government and politicians seem to have nothing to counter the trend. They console themselves with t

  In Minsk, the capital of Belarus, on September 6, 2021, Maria Kalesnikawa and Maxim Snak were sentenced to long prison terms. The trial was held in a closed session. The trial was not intended to provide a public platform for dissidents. The people of Belarus have long tried to resist the dictatorship of President Lukashenko. His opponents have been repeatedly silenced with police violence and arrests. After the obviously rigged presidential election results in August 2020, thousands of people took to the streets peacefully and demonstrated for months despite violence and arrests. The dictator had already had a few opponents arrested before the election, and the arrests continued, forcing the leaders of the democracy movement to flee abroad for safety. The ruler did not even hesitate to force a plane to land in Minsk to arrest a journalist. The death of an opponent in Ukraine can probably also be attributed to Lukashenko's people. It is all the more astonishing that Maria K

  Yesterday I saw a movie about women in politics in the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the post-war period, politics were completely in the hands of men. The movie showed Herbert von Karajan directing an all-male philharmonic orchestra interspersed with photos of black and white photos of groups of all-male politicians. These impressions hit home and will not be soon forgotten. However, some women were convinced that democracy needs to represent more than half the population. The 28 female representatives in the first parliament (1949-1953) made up 6,8% of the legislative body. It was only in 1987 that the percentage topped made double digits with 15,4%. The documentary movie used original film material and retrospective comments by the pioneering women themselves to show what it was like to be a parliamentarian in the male-dominated culture of the time. A clip from that time showed a couple sitting down to dinner with the commentary: “A woman has two vital issu