The Times of India: Sonya Fatah.
Sitara Brooj Akbar, a 12-year-old girl, hails from Rabwah, a town of 70,000 people, some 180km west of Lahore. Last year the young Sitara achieved a noteworthy academic record: she became the first girl of her age to clear the Cambridge University Ordinary Level examinations in three subjects: English, Urdu and Physics. She was nine when she cleared Chemistry, and 10 years of age when she cleared Biology.
Sitara claims two local icons. For style and female power, she emulates Benazir Bhutto, wearing a light scarf casually over the back of her head and across her shoulders. I am ‘daughter of the east’ she says, taking on a title accorded to Bhutto. Her intellectual hero is Abdus Salam, a Pakistani physicist who won the country’s only Nobel Prize (in Physics) in 1979 but was treated quite shabbily, to say the least.