By D N Singh
Be it America or England, women of Indian origin have straight garnered distinctions holding constitutional and administrative positions.
Traveling back to years there comes a recollection about a young woman from Haryana who starting her dreams from flying paper planes got herself ready to conquer the space as the first Indian origin woman to enter the space . That was Kalpana Chawla who raced to unfathomable highs from the terrace to space.
A dreamer by any yardstick Kalpana tried and tried through all the odds while not shunning her lofty dreams not knowing what lied ahead.
It were all her dreams and doggedness which helped one day spending 31 days plus in the space as a leading astronaut .
Born  in Karnal, Haryana, in 962, the youngest of the four siblings had no formal name and was lovingly called Montu for the first few years. When her parents took her to enrol her in school, they were given a few options to decide and mention in the enrolment form. She ironically chose to be named Kalpana, meaning imagination.
Like morning shows the day, Kalpana had sprang many surprises for the family and teachers yet she never gave up her gaze at the constellation.
Despite many odd that ,she was the first woman to study aeronautical engineering, a rare stream chosen by the handful of women engineers and soon Kalpana moved to Arlington, United States, in September 1982.
Then the jump and in 1992 in Nivember she as a part of  six-astronaut crew, she took off on board space shuttle Columbia flight STS-87, becoming the first India-born woman in space and the second India-born astronaut in space.
Kalpana returned to earth on 5 December 1997. In January 1998, she was assigned as crew representative for shuttle and station flight crew equipment, and subsequently served as lead for Astronaut Office’s Crew Systems and Habitability section. In 2003, at 40, Kalpana went to space for the second time.
On 1 February 2003, during Columbia’s re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, hot atmospheric air entered the shuttle’s wing where there was a damage during takeoff. Kalpana died, along with the rest of the crew
when the spaceship disintegrated, just 16 minutes prior to its scheduled landing.
An illustrious chapter of an Indian born woman came to end leaving behind indelible footprints in the sky.
