Meera Khanna | |
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| Alma mater | Delhi University (MA) |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, poet, gender rights activist |
Meera Khanna is an Indian writer, poet, and gender rights activist. She is the trustee and Executive Vice President of the Guild for Service, which was founded by V. Mohini Giri. [1] She spearheaded a global alliance called "The Last Woman First". [2] Khanna is also co-founder and South Asia chapter chair of Every Woman Coalition.
Khanna completed her schooling at Pune and Firozpur, India. She obtained graduate honors and master’s degrees in English Literature from Delhi University.[ citation needed ]
Khanna works in the development sector and focuses on women’s empowerment and capacity building, especially in rural India. She is the trustee and Executive Vice President of the Guild of Service. [1] [3] Under her leadership, the Guild of Service has established and run shelter homes and capacity-building, family counselling, and production centers, as well as schools for children from marginalized communities. The Guild of Service also currently runs homes for destitute women in Vrindavan, Godhra, Nagapattinam, and Srinagar. Khanna also helped establish and run homes for militancy-affected women and children in Srinagar, and Baramulla, Kashmir.
Khanna lead a global alliance called "The Last Woman First". [2] She is the co-founder of Every Woman Coalition, and Director of the South Asian Network for Widows’ Empowerment in Development. She is a trustee of Navdanya, an advisor at the War Widows Association, and a member of the Civil Society Advisory Group under UN Women, India. She has served as a consultant to the Government of India’s High Level Committee on the Status of Women, and was a member of two Expert Committees on Widows, constituted by the National Commission for Women and the Supreme Court of India. [4] [5]
Khanna was also the Founder-Trustee of Women's Initiative for Peace in South Asia, [6] through which she led a Women's Delegation to Pakistan and coordinated the South Asian Women Writers and a Creative Workshop that involved an exhibition by South Asian women photographers, as well as South Asian theater festival, Imaging Peace.
Khanna also drafted the Resolution on Widows for UN Action, which was presented to the first Under Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women, Michelle Bachelet. That resolution was supported by more than 80 organizations across the world. Khanna was a speaker at the UN Human Rights Council 42nd session (09/20/2019) as part of the Widows in Crisis and Conflict Panel. [7] Khanna also co-edited "Mantras for Positive Ageing" with Dr V Mohini Giri. The book carries a foreword by the Dalai Lama. [8]
Amity University, Noida awarded Khanna the Women Achievers Award in 2018. [9] The Women’s Federation for World Peace recognized Khanna with the 2019 Fostering Peace Within the Individual award. [10] Khanna was also featured in UN Women India's Mujhe Haq Hai campaign, which aimed to inspire women to defy norms by rising above challenges. [11] [12]
A widow (female) or widower (male) is a person whose spouse has died and has usually not remarried. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood. An archaic term for a widow is "relict," literally "someone left over". This word can sometimes be found on older gravestones. The male form, "widower", is first attested in the 14th century, by the 19th century supplanting "widow" with reference to men.
Twinkle Khanna, also known as Tina Jatin Khanna, is an Indian author, columnist, interior designer, film producer, and former actress.
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Kumari Jayawardena is a Sri Lankan feminist activist and academic. Her work is part of the canon of Third-world feminism which conceptualizes feminist philosophies as indigenous and unique to non-Western societies and nations rather than offshoots of Western feminism. She has taught at the University of Colombo and the International Institute of Social Studies.
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Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati was an Indian social reformer. She was the first woman to be awarded the titles of Pandita as a Sanskrit scholar and Sarasvati after being examined by the faculty of the University of Calcutta. She was one of the ten women delegates of the Congress session of 1889. During her stay in England in early 1880s she converted to Christianity. After that she toured extensively in the United States to collect funds for destitute Indian women. With the funds raised she started Sharada Sadan for child widows. In the late 1890s, she founded Mukti Mission, a Christian charity at Kedgaon village, forty miles east of the city of Pune. The mission was later named Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission.
Meera Chopra is an Indian actress and model who appears in Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi-language films. In Tamil films, she is credited as Nila.
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Meera Shankar served as India's Ambassador to the United States of America from 26 April 2009 to 2011. She was India's second female ambassador to the United States of America, Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit being the first. She was succeeded by Nirupama Rao on August 1, 2011.
Martha Chen is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). Martha is a development practitioner and scholar who has worked with the working poor in India, South Asia, and around the world. Her areas of specialization are employment, poverty alleviation, informal economy, and gender. She lived in Bangladesh working with BRAC, one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations, and in India, as field representative of Oxfam America for India and Bangladesh for 15 years.
The Forgotten Woman is a 2008 Canadian documentary film directed by Dilip Mehta and written by Deepa Mehta. The film is about widows in India and was inspired by Deepa Mehta's 2005 Academy Award-nominated film on the same subject, Water.
V. Mohini Giri was an Indian community service worker and activist, who was Chairperson of the Guild of Service, a New Delhi-based social service organisation. Established in 1979, it provides advocacy for women's and children's rights for education, employment, and financial security. She founded War Widows Association, New Delhi in 1972, and was Chairperson of the National Commission for Women (1995–1998).
Thapki Pyar Ki is an Indian Hindi-language television series that aired on Colors TV from 2 May 2015 to 14 July 2017, completing 704 episodes. It is the story of Thapki Chaturvedi, a young woman who has a stutter. It stars Jigyasa Singh, Manish Goplani, Nitanshi Goel, Ankit Bathla, Sheena Bajaj, and Monica Khanna.
Mehmooda Ahmed Ali Shah (1920-2014), also known as Miss Mehmooda, was an Indian educationist, social activist and the principal of Government College for Women, M.A. Road Srinagar. She was a close friend of Indira Gandhi and is reported to have worked for creating awareness among the women of Kashmir about the importance of education and for their social empowerment. The Government of India awarded her the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2006, for her contributions to Indian education.
Syeda Saiyidain Hameed is an Indian social and women's rights activist, educationist, writer and a former member of the Planning Commission of India. She chaired the Steering Committee of the Commission on Health which reviewed the National Health Policy of 2002, till the dissolution of the body in 2015, to be replaced by NITI Aayog.
Waaris is an Indian Hindi drama television series based on the practice of Bacha posh and broadcast on &TV from 16 May 2016 to 1 December 2017. The title track has been sung by the Nooran Sisters. It stars Arti Singh, Farnaz Shetty and Neel Motwani.
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Harphoul Mohini is a Hindi language action romance neo noir family entertainer adventure horror supernatural thriller show based on a Haryanvi Jaat Boy and Malayali Girl produced by Cockcrow Entertainment and Shaika Films. It aired from 13 June 2022 to 8 December 2022 on Colors TV, starring Shagun Sharma and Zebby Singh.
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