Shweta Katti, the girl with an iron spirit, is disappointed at not being able to write the Toefl exam on Sunday as she did not get her passport on time. The stumbling block, however, hasn’t dented her determination. The 18-year-old, who grew up Mumbai’s red-light area, has a reason to cheer as the prestigious Bard College in the U.S. has expressed willingness to grant her admission and waive her fee.
Shweta who featured in Newsweek’s Women in The World: 25 Under-25 Young Women To Watch, along with Malala Yousufzai says, “Not
being able to write my Toefl after being driven from pillar to post upsets me, but I can’t get bogged down by it. The US college has offered me enrollment in their UG programme and I am really excited about it. I have to leave in the first week of August and I am sure I’ll have my passport by then.”
“The university also plans to launch a campaign for me asking its alumni to raise funds,” she adds.
Before she sets sail to the US, Shweta has two internships back home. “I am going to Delhi on April 22 for four weeks and then to Himachal Pradesh for around six weeks. I will be working in the rural areas in these places as a part of my leadership training,” says Shweta.
She, however, says that the chain of events in the past one week have been both physically and mentally draining. “As directed by the passport office, I applied for the passport in the normal quota on April 5 and even got my file number the same day. However, the delay in verification at the local police station led to the delay in me getting the passport. Unfortunately, the exam was slated for a Sunday and government offices don’t work on weekends,” she says.
The fiery teenager has her future plans already in place. “After I pursue psychology, I want to set
up a centre at Kamathipura for sex workers. They are in dire need of counselling and therapy,” says Shweta, who lives at a shelter home in Kandivali.
Growing up in a brothel wasn’t easy for Shweta. She says, “When I was a kid, at night I could hear sex workers fighting with their drunk husbands. They would beat up their wives. If you are a woman or a girl, living in brothels is just not safe.”
Recalling the traumatic events while growing up, she says that she was sexually abused at home. “The events took a toll on me. However, after undergoing therapy sessions at
Kranti, the NGO currently I am associated with, I gained confidence.”
While taking a dig at the government, she says, “Everybody talks about the privileged ones and even the government helps those having resources. What about people like us who have been neglected and sidelined all the time?”