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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

Maulana’s 'gullak' initiative touches 60K students

Read & Lead Foundation President Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza with daughter Mariyam Mirza. Mumbai/Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: In the new age controlled by smart-gadgets and social media, an academic from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar has sparked a small, head-turning and successful - ‘savings and reading’ revolution among middle-school children. Launched in 2006, by Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza, the humble initiative turns 20 this year and witnessed over 60,000 free savings boxes (gullaks)...

Maulana’s 'gullak' initiative touches 60K students

Read & Lead Foundation President Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza with daughter Mariyam Mirza. Mumbai/Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: In the new age controlled by smart-gadgets and social media, an academic from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar has sparked a small, head-turning and successful - ‘savings and reading’ revolution among middle-school children. Launched in 2006, by Maulana Abdul Qayyum Mirza, the humble initiative turns 20 this year and witnessed over 60,000 free savings boxes (gullaks) distributed to Class V-VIII students in 52 government and private schools. “The aim was to inculcate a love for ‘saving and reading’ among young children. We started by presenting small plastic ‘gullaks’ (savings boxes) at the Iqra Boys & Girls High School, and later to many other schools,” Mirza said with a tinge of satisfaction. Scoffed by sceptics, it soon caught the eyes of the schools and parents who loved the idea that kept the kids off mischief, but gave them the joy of quietly slipping Re. 1 or even Rs. 5 save from their daily pocket money into the ‘gullak’. “That tiny ‘gullak’ costing barely Rs 3-Rs 5, becomes almost like their personal tiny bank which they guard fiercely and nobody dares touch it. At the right time they spend the accumulated savings to buy books of their choice – with no questions asked. Isn’t it better than wasting it on toys or sweets or amusement,” chuckled Mirza. A childhood bookworm himself, Mirza, now 50, remembers how he dipped into his school’s ‘Book Box’ to avail books of his choice and read them along with the regular syllabus. “Reading became my passion, not shared by many then or even now… Sadly, in the current era, reading and saving are dying habits. I am trying to revive them for the good of the people and country,” Maulana Mirza told The Perfect Voice. After graduation, Mirza was jobless for sometime, and decided to make his passion as a profession – he took books in a barter deal from the renowned Nagpur philanthropist, Padma Bhushan Maulana Abdul Karim Parekh, lugged them on a bicycle to hawk outside mosques and dargahs. He not only sold the entire stock worth Rs 3000 quickly, but asked astonished Parekh for more – and that set the ball rolling in a big way, ultimately emboldening him to launch the NGO, ‘Read & Lead Foundation’ (2018). “However, despite severe resources and manpower crunch, we try to cater to the maximum number of students, even outside the district,” smiled Mirza. The RLF is also supported by his daughter Mariyam Mirza’s Covid-19 pandemic scheme, ‘Mohalla Library Movement’ that catapulted to global fame, and yesterday (Oct. 20), the BBC telecast a program featuring her. The father-daughter duo urged children to shun mobiles, video-games, television or social media and make ‘books as their best friends’, which would always help in life, as they aim to gift 1-lakh students with ‘gullaks’ in the next couple of years. At varied intervals Mirza organizes small school book fairs where the excited kids troop in, their pockets bulging with their own savings, and they proudly purchase books of their choice in Marathi, English, Hindi or Urdu to satiate their intellectual hunger. Fortunately, the teachers and parents support the kids’ ‘responsible spending’, for they no longer waste hours before screens but attentively flip pages of their favourite books, as Mirza and others solicit support for the cause from UNICEF, UNESCO, and global NGOs/Foundations. RLF’s real-life savers: Readers UNICEF’s Jharkhand District Coordinator and ex-TISS alumnus Abul Hasan Ali is full of gratitude for the ‘gullak’ habit he inculcated years ago, while Naregaon Municipal High School students Lakhan Devdas (Class 6) and Sania Youssef (Class 8) say they happily saved most of their pocket or festival money to splurge on their favourite books...! Zilla Parishad Girls Primary School (Aurangpura) teacher Jyoti Pawar said the RLF has proved to be a “simple, heartwarming yet effective way” to habituate kids to both reading and savings at a tender age, while a parent Krishna Shinde said it has “changed the whole attitude of children”. “We encourage books of general interest only, including inspiring stories of youth icons like Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai (28) and environmentalist Greta Thunberg (23) which fascinates our students, and other popular children’s literature,” smiled Mirza. The Maulana’s RLF, which has opened three dozen libraries in 7 years, acknowledges that every coin dropped into the small savings boxes begins a new chapter – and turns into an investment in knowledge that keeps growing.

Hollow Unity

For a country that styles itself the world’s largest democracy, India certainly needs a robust Opposition. In theory, the coming together of parties in the INDIA bloc should be cause for optimism. A chorus of dissent if disciplined, credible and rooted in evidence, can check the excesses of any government. But the noisy march to the Election Commission (EC) office in Delhi was no such moment of principled defiance. It was a performance staged for the cameras and propelled less by democratic conviction than by political opportunism.


In its first major street protest since the 2024 general election, the motley coalition of Congress, Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, the Left and others rallied against the EC’s ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR) of Bihar’s electoral rolls, as well as alleged “vote chori” in the Lok Sabha polls. Some 300 placard-waving MPs in colour-coded party caps marched to NirvachanSadan, clambering over police barricades and shouted slogans before being detained in theatrical fashion before being released two hours later.


It was an arresting spectacle. But what lay beneath the noise was depressingly hollow. Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, treated the episode as a veritable ‘coronation moment’ in proclaiming that this was a “fight for the Constitution” and “one man, one vote.” Without verifiable evidence, such slogans ring as tinny as a cracked cymbal.


The EC has already dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as baseless and misleading. Far from engaging with the charges in good faith, the Opposition leaders have sidestepped the Commission’s request to file formal complaints with documentary proof under oath. Officials from Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana even wrote to Gandhi personally, inviting him to submit evidence. The invitation remains unanswered.


This is not the conduct of a movement genuinely invested in reforming India’s electoral machinery. It is the choreography of an Opposition that has been listless for months, suddenly discovering that street theatre can mask the absence of a credible legislative or policy alternative. By framing the protest as a moral crusade, Gandhi also sought to elbow out other contenders for leadership within the rickety INDIA bloc while banking on images of hand-holding solidarity to restore the Congress’s waning primacy.


Unity in the Opposition is, in principle, a public good. But unity forged in opportunism, and directed at phantom grievances, corrodes democratic discourse rather than strengthening it. The more the bloc resorts to noisy but evidence-free allegations, the more it invites the government to dismiss legitimate concerns in future as mere political posturing.


Such antics may briefly dominate television coverage, but they do little to inspire confidence in the Opposition’s capacity to govern should it ever return to power. That it was the INDIA bloc’s first real show of unity only underlines how little binds its members beyond the shared hope of dislodging the BJP. The Opposition’s tragedy is not that it lacks causes worth fighting for but that it repeatedly squanders its energy on causes that collapse under scrutiny.


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