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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.

When Art Becomes a Battlefield: Revisiting ‘The Train’

Updated: Feb 18

The Train

In the waning months of World War II as the Allies inch closer to Paris, an art-obsessed Nazi colonel embarks on a final, desperate act of cultural plunder. A locomotive brimming with stolen masterpieces - works by Renoir, Matisse, Degas, Picasso, Van Gogh - barrels toward Germany. Thus begins John Frankenheimer’s relentlessly riveting ‘The Train’ (1964).


The film, one of the last great action spectacles shot in stark black and white, is a rare bird - an ‘intellectual actioner’ that merges spectacle with substance.

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War films have long been fixated on what makes a cause worth fighting for. Most stories in the genre hinge on the salvation of people, nations or ideologies, but ‘The Train’ is different. It wrestles with the idea that a country’s identity is not only its people but also its art. Yet it does not glorify this ideal without question.


Burt Lancaster, in a performance as rugged as the steel tracks his character fights to sabotage, plays French Resistance leader Labiche, a railwayman with no love for the art in question. Yet, he and his fellow partisans engage in a deadly chess match to thwart the train commandeered by the film’s most compelling figure - Nazi Colonel von Waldheim, played with mesmerizing menace by Paul Scofield.


Waldheim is no ordinary villain. Unlike the cartoonish Nazi brutes of WW2 films, he is cultured, a man who speaks of art with near-religious reverence. For him, the paintings are the essence of civilization itself. His obsession makes him dangerous, but also strangely tragic.


The hardened Labiche is deeply sceptical of the notion that culture is worth more than a man’s life. But as the film unfolds, his actions betray his cynicism. He begins derailing the train’s journey, engaging in a lethal war of wits with von Waldheim. Labiche, for all his pragmatism, cannot bring himself to let the Nazis abscond with the “soul of France.”


Frankenheimer, who took over after Lancaster fired the original director Arthur Penn for making the film ‘too intellectual,’ crafts a masterpiece of tension and realism. The train sequences, filmed with real locomotives, are breathtaking.


François Truffaut once remarke d that war films in black and white feel more authentic, and here, cinematographer Jean Tournier delivers stunning compositions reinforcing the film’s realism. The deep shadows and stark contrasts recall war photography, lending an almost documentary-like immediacy.


Frankenheimer’s dynamic camerawork heightens the film’s relentless momentum. One of the most jaw-dropping sequences - a real train derailment wherein a train loaded with Nazi troops collides with another at full speed - is a visceral reminder of an era when action cinema was built on precision and ingenuity rather than digital trickery.


Beyond the action, there are moments of quiet devastation, none more affecting than Michel Simon’s poignant performance as ‘Papa Boulle,’ the aging railway worker caught in the resistance’s deadly game. Simon, a legendary French actor, imbues Boulle with warmth and weary dignity. In a single, heartbreaking moment, when he naïvely assumes he can outwit the Nazis only to meet a cruel fate, Simon captures the human cost of war.


Lancaster, who performed many of his own stunts, brings a raw physicality to the role. Maurice Jarre’s percussive score adds to the film’s sense of urgency.


The 1960s were a golden era for World War II cinema. Big-budget ‘caper’ epics like ‘The Guns of Navarone’ (1961), ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967) and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ (1968) delivered slam-bang action while more cerebral thrillers like ‘The Counterfeit Traitor’ (1962) and ‘The Night of the Generals’ (1967) examined war’s ethical complexities. ‘The Train’ straddles both worlds, delivering heart-pounding thrills while posing difficult questions.


Yet, for all its action, The Train is ultimately a film about values. In a world where art is often dismissed as secondary to survival, its central dilemma remains eerily relevant today. In the film’s haunting final shot, as Labiche’s silent, limping figure walks away from the dead bodies and the undisturbed art masterpieces, the uncomfortable question lingers: What, in the end, is truly worth saving?


Today, when so much action cinema is driven by CGI bombast, ‘The Train’ feels like an artifact from a lost age. It is a film about the fragility of culture, the cost of resistance and the uneasy choices war forces upon those caught in its grasp. It remains, in every sense, a must-watch.

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