Verve People
Passionate Crusader: Shami Chakrabarti
Text by Mala Vaishnav
Recently assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom on BBC Radio 4 and included in 100 Makers of the 21st Century, the director of the 80-year-old human rights organisation, Liberty, has been the recipient of bouquets – and brickbats – in her illustrious and challenging career as an activist. She considers her job an enormous privilege and rates the greatest injustice in the world as gender injustice. The London-born Bengali, who lately revealed to a British daily that her alternative career could have been that of a Hollywood screenwriter, was once placed on the shortlist of a listener poll by The BBC Radio 4 Today to establish ‘who runs Britain’!
Big fan of: David Bowie.
Subject of: A single by the Birmingham band, The Dastards.
Firm belief: ‘After I gave birth to my son, I thought if I can do that, I can do anything.’