SHE COULD HAVE ESCAPED, BUT, SHE WAS NOT A PERSON TO QUIT. AND IT WAS THIS COURAGE THAT DESERVED TO BE AWARDED.

The question, whom do you most admire, living or dead, needs to come with a clause: think of a new name. Because Mother Teresa has been the obvious choice for years. Such is the legend of the first and only Indian woman to have won a Nobel Peace Prize (1979).

A young Catholic nun from Albania, Agnes Bojaxhiu arrived as a missionary in 1929 Calcutta. She was 21. As she walked about her adopted city, the destitution around her was so great that she felt compelled to leave her institution so she could do more. Her mission became an order of its own, The Missionaries of Charity, now working with the poor, sick and abandoned in 160 cities across 87 countries.

In September 2016, Mother Teresa was canonised and declared a saint.

Neerja Bhanot was a model, a career woman, a survivor of an abusive marriage. She was also the youngest person and the first woman to be awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award, posthumously. She was all of 23 when she died.

Neerja worked for Pan American Airways and lost her life while saving 359 passengers of a Pan Am flight hijacked by armed men in September 1986 at Karachi. Eyewitnesses said it was Bhanot who alerted the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer so that they could escape, ensuring that the flight could not take off. As soon as she realised that the terrorists were targeting American passengers, she got them to hand over their passports so they couldn’t be singled out. She was shot dead while helping passengers sneak out of the emergency exits. She could have slid down the chute and escaped, her father said later. But, he added, she was not a person to quit. Bhanot has been immortalised in many ways — a coffee table book, The Neerja I Knew, conceptualised by her brother Aneesh; a life-size sculpture in Punjab by artist Manjit Singh Gill. More recently, the 2016 film Neerja dramatised her story.