Malala's story left Twinkle Khanna 'teary-eyed'

Malala Yousafzai, who recently graduated from Oxford University, participated in an online interview with former Bollywood actor Twinkle Khanna. The conversation was part of a virtual Tweak India Summit that was organised to mark the actor-turned-author’s initiatives’ first anniversary.

The one-day summit featured women from various fields including Vidya Balan, Tahira Kashyap, Chetna Singh Gala, Sudha Murty, Revathi Roy among others.

Malala, who juggles multiple roles of an activist, student, and manages her own organisation, the Malala Fund, shared her empowering story and discussed what kept her motivated despite the criticism.

Khanna now says interacting with Malala left her teary-eyed. Twinkle interviewed Malala, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate and Pakistani activist, for her digital content platform Tweak.

"The interview with Malala was meant to be just audio. Just as I set it up, it shifted to video. I hurriedly pushed back my hair and managed to stab my eye with a kohl pencil in a hurry to look vaguely human. In the end, it didn't matter because listening to her story made me all teary-eyed and everything smudged," the Mela star told IANS.

During the interview, Malala also recalled the time she’d write blogs for the BBC, anonymously highlighting the situation. But why would she take that risk despite the death threats? “I never thought that I was taking a risk because we were already living in risk, in a conflict. Every night I’d sleep in the fear of the Taliban because they could just knock on your door and kill anyone,” she remarked.

Bewildered, Khanna continued to reinstate how coming to that realisation, for an 11-year-old, had to be a quantum leap. “So there must’ve been someone in your life who guided you towards that space,” she asked. “My father was my inspiration,” responded Malala.

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