November 2025
– We chose 12th November to celebrate Science at Shaktii as WISE, Women in Science Conference. It was also chosen because it happens to be the birth anniversary of Padmashree Late. Shrimati Rohini Godbole, a theoretical Physicist.
– It so happened that our library had this book about 31 women scientists who are doing fantastic work in their respective fields but they are not that well known to us common people. So Vimala Ma’am got this idea of making our girls enact as some of those scientists and make it into a celebration of these wonderful scientists.
– We assigned the girls scientists of different fields and gave them brief information about their scientists and the work that they are doing. We then gave them five criterias {1] Introduction, 2] details of their work, 3] Visuals, 4] How their work is helpful to the society/country, 5] Conclusion} and asked them to do some more research about their assigned scientist and come up with their presentation paper. Winner of this assignment would be the winner of the “Budding Scientist Award”. Our Shaktii girls are incredible. Every one of them came up with wonderful papers of their assigned scientists with amazing hand made props and pictures as visuals. Looking at their tremendous interest, we decided to divide the girls into two groups according to the level of their calibre and we also added a consolation prize. Before the girls could come as scientists, eighth class girls performed a small skit about congruence of triangles to show how they learn Maths in a fun way in Shaktii and as Maths is the queen of science it was an appropriate beginning of today’s program.
– Judges for this competition were Retired Scientist of BARC Dr.Lalita Dhareshwar, Retired Scientist of BARC Dr.Nandakumar and Ms.Kamakshi Vairagi, a physics teacher. All three judges had words of appreciation for the girls and of course a few golden pieces of advice from their experiences in the field of science. Each girl presented her paper in front of the judges with full confidence and answered the questions asked by the judges. Sampada Monde won the Budding Scientist award. She was enacting the Seismologist Kusala Rajendran and the Consolation prize was won by Shagun Kanojia, who presented her paper as Environmental Scientist Vanita Prasad. Both from the ninth class. Preeti Marjapur of eighth class was a wonderful anchor today and carried the whole show with a lot of pizzazz and also the Vote of thanks was proposed by an eighth standard girl, Anushka Singh.
– Prizes might have been won by 9th class girls, but 8th class girls proved that they are smart and confident too. The highlight of today’s program was two video messages for the girls of Shaktii from two women scientist, Dr.Arpita Ghosh {Molecular Geneticist & Cancer Biologist}, through whom we got in touch with Dr. Lipi Thukral {Computational Structural Biologist}. Dr.Lipi is featured in the book amongst the 31 scientists and we were all thrilled to get a video message from her. The success of today’s program reflects the hard work put in by every Shaktii girl and we all got to learn that Science is not just Physics,Chemistry and Biology, Science is in every aspect of our lives.
– Imagination is more important than knowledge – Albert Einstein. Kalyani Basu
