The Chennai Institute of Technological Studies in India has just awarded her her engineering degree, chemistry specialty after two years of distance learning, in her living room, equipped with a wifi connection and a laboratory made with the elements found on the spot.
She is a young graduate armed with unfailing determination since Behishta Khairrudin is Afghan, and despite the ban on women having access to education, she has just obtained her engineering degree, specializing in chemistry, and she did it from her home, from the living room of her apartment in a city in northern Afghanistan. However, this is not at all how she had envisaged her studies.
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Already holder of a patent in technology, Behishta intended to stay on the benches of the university. In August 2021, when the Taliban entered Kabul, she had just applied to join IIT Madras, the Chennai Institute of Technological Studies in India, a prestigious public university, her application had been accepted, she was about to go over there, settle on campus, and then everything closed. The gates of the country first, impossible for her, a young single woman, to leave the territory, then the gates of her home.
Quickly, she asked the school management, and she asked for the right to be able to follow the course despite everything, remotely, on the Internet, from her home. What the Institute accepted. For two years, Behishta therefore relied on the family wifi connection, “very random connection, she confides to the Times of Indiabut essential.“The first two semesters, learning is a struggle: the lessons are in English, while she has only ever studied in Dari. But she hangs on.
Kitchen jars for doing chemistry experiments
Being in chemistry, she also made a small laboratory, using kitchen jars, a measuring cup and her sister’s microwave. The installation is precarious, but she manages to carry out the requested experiments, to send the results of her work and finally to obtain her diploma, thus joining her hundred of comrades who have spent all their schooling face-to-face.
To the journalist who asks her if she has any bitterness, Behishta Khairrudin replies: “I have no regrets, I just want to say to the Taliban, you want to stop me? Well, I find other ways, other means, I move forward.“She adds that not everyone can hang on like that, that if she did it was thanks to the support of her family, her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters,”but i say to all the girls, study, open books, take this power, and don’t get depressed, because they will fall one day, we, we will change them.” And if nothing was due to chance? Behishta means “the optimist” in his native language.