The visionary maulana A senior assistant editor with the Times of India, Mohammed Wajihuddin writes about Muslims, their issues, hopes and aspirations. Committed to upholding inclusiveness, communal amity and freedom to dissent and debate, he endeavours to promote peaceful existence. A passionate reader of Islam, he endeavours to save the faith from the clutches of the jihadists. An ardent lover of Urdu poetry, he believes words are the best weapons to fight jingoism. LESS... MORE After I was uprooted from then intellectually vibrant Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and planted in Patna in the late 1980s where I lived till 1993, I tried to made up the loss through writing letters to the editors of newspapers. I became so prolific a letter writer, mostly to the editor—then Uttam Sengupta was the Resident Editor, of The Times of India in Patna—that many readers began inquiring about me. Then TOI Patna would carry at least three letters of mine in a week. To increase interactions with the readers, the editor had liberally given space for these letters under different slots—Readers’ Response, Sunday Forum, Letters…Since there was not much in my surroundings to fall back on, I made newspapers and books my friends. The ancient Ganga flowed a few feet away from my rented room at the crowded mohalla where boys my age played carrom and jobless elders spent the day gossiping. I became a member of the iconic Khuda Baksh Library and would drop letters to the Editor at newspapers’ offices on my way to the library on a bicycle.