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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.

Twice-convicted, Saquib Nachan back into limelight

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Mumbai: Convicted twice for various terror activities, shady links and unholy anti-national plots, Thane’s most infamous baddie, Saquib A. Nachan has again shot to attention, for mostly similar reasons.

 

A permanent fixture on the radars of the Maharashtra Police and state and central intelligence and security agencies, this time the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) swooped on Nachan and his associates in the twin villages of Borivali-Padgha in Thane. 

 

Nabbed multiple times by different agencies, Nachan, 66, is currently cooling heels in a New Delhi jail in a two-year-old case related to the global terror group ISIS and his purported links with it.

 

Sources in Bhiwandi said that from his collegian days in the 1980s, Nachan – using several aliases - displayed rebellious tendencies and joined the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), now banned.

 

Over the years, he grew in SIMI, came in contact with Chenaparambil Abdulkader Muhammed Basheer, alias CAM Basheer, an extreme radical hailing from Kerala.

 

Nachan went ahead to forge ties with some Khalistani terror outfits, Pakistan’s ISI and lately with the much-dreaded ISIS, of which he was a self-appointed Maharashtra head.

 

The ATS raids on June 2 (yesterday, Monday) were prompted after the agencies tightened their vigil on potential mischief-mongers following the April 22 Pahalgam terror strikes on tourists.

 

Post-raids on Monday, the ATS said that Nachan had delivered fiery and provocative speeches to sway the local populace towards planning anti-national actions/attacks.

 

On getting reliable intel of such possibilities, the ATS moved a local Magistrate for search warrants and raided more than 20 locations yesterday, besides detaining a dozen suspects for planning violent disturbances.

 

For Nachan, there was a sudden break in 1992 when he and a Khalistani extremist Lal Singh – entrusted with implementing Operation K2 (Kashmir-Khalistan) – were nabbed and convicted. Nachan spent 10 years in jail.

 

After completing his sentence in 2001, he was again suspected and arrested for the three bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai between Dec. 2002-March 2003 at Mumbai Central’s McDonalds outlet (Dec. 6, 2002), the Vile Parle station market (Jan. 17, 2003) and in a local train compartment in Mulund (March 30, 2003) - totally claiming 13 lives and injuring more than 130 people.

 

The Mumbai Police had clubbed the three terror strikes and in its combined chargesheet, had accused Nachan and others of criminal conspiracy to wage a war against India. He was convicted and sentenced to jail for 10 years, after which he was set free in 2017.

 

Earlier, he was also arrested as the prime suspect in the murder of a Bajrang Dal activist Lalit Jain in Bhiwandi, but was acquitted in 2006 for lack of sufficient evidence.

 

Nachan was nabbed again in Aug. 2012 for a murder attempt on a Vishwa Hindu Parishad functionary Manoj Raicha, and was subsequently enlarged on bail in Aug. 2014.

 

In 2023, when the country was limping back from the Covid-19 Pandemic lockdowns, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) knocked on Nachan’s door and picked him up for the ISIS-related case.

 

Among other things, he had proclaimed the Padgha village as ‘Al Sham’ (liberated), and administered the ‘Bayath’ (oath of allegiance) to the Khalifa of ISIS to new recruits, etc.

 

Kindred souls – Nachans, Bhatkals, Memons and Kaskars

A B.Com. graduate with a sharp legal acumen that dazes even top lawyers, Saquib A. Nachan admitted in the past that he visited Dubai, Afghanistan, Pakistan and more countries, ostensibly to build ties with extremist outfits based/functioning from there and casting an evil eye on India.

 

Once in the 1980s, he joined the Afghanistan Mujahideen groups to wage war against the Soviet Union, which brought him in contact with more merchants of terror.

 

Given his inglorious track record, Nachan and his kin, along with the Karnataka-based Bhatkal kin, Yasin and Riyaz who founded the much-feared Indian Mujahideen (IM) in 2007, remain among the 'most-watched persons' in the country.

 

The Nachans (Thane), the Bhatkals (Karnataka) and earlier the Memon clan, as also the absconder Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar families (both from Mumbai), are rank as the most notorious domestic terror pot-stirrers, though many still await their date with the law.

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