Судьба детского журнала Gul Bootay под вопросом после смерти его основателя Фарука Сияда

When Farooq Syed died on the evening of 19 May 2026, the tributes that followed spoke of a fearless Urdu journalist, a chronicler of Mumbai's working poor, and a man whose columns made sense of the city's politics for readers who rarely saw themselves represented in the press.  Almost every obituary mentioned, sooner or later, Gul Bootay. This is a children's monthly he founded in 1996 and edited for three decades. What none of them could answer was what happens to the magazine now that Farooq Syed has exited. The question is significant for Urdu publishing in Maharashtra, a field that has shrunk steadily even as the language's readership has not disappeared so much as dispersed into Hindi, into English, into WhatsApp forwards and Instagram and YouTube.  Gul Bootay was, by most accounts, an outlier: a non-governmental children's magazine that built what its own contributors called the highest circulation in its category, sustained not by advertising heft or institutional backing but by one editor's relationship with his readers. His editorial column, Chhoti Si Baat (a small matter) was less a masthead formality than the magazine's spine, dispensing practical, plainly worded advice to children in a simple register. That kind of voice is difficult to hand down. Magazines built around institutions survive their founders; magazines built around a sensibility often do not. Gul Bootay 's stable of columnists (among them Hamid Iqbal Siddiqui, Mubarak Kapri and Asim Syed) gave the publication range, but the editorial judgment that decided what belonged between two covers each month, and the personal rapport with young readers that made a monthly Urdu magazine feel less like homework and more like a friend, were Farooq Syed's alone.  The Hindi edition launched in his later years was proof of ambition, not proof of a succession plan. Nor does the wider ecosystem offer much cushioning. Urdu print in India survives on thin margins and thinner institutional memory; when an editor who is also the publisher dies, the magazine does not merely lose a byline, it loses its financing, its printer relationships, its distribution network and its archive, all of which tend to live in one person's head and one person's contacts. Family members and admirers have said little publicly about continuity plans beyond the condolences; that silence, more than any statement, is what should worry those who care about the publication. None of this diminishes what Farooq Syed built. For thirty years, in a city not short of distractions, Gul Bootay persuaded Urdu-speaking children to read for pleasure. Whether the magazine survives him will likely be decided not by nostalgia but by whether anyone is willing and able to do, without pay and without recognition for years, what a founder-editor does out of love. History suggests such magazines rarely outlast the person who willed them into being. Gul Bootay 's next few issues, or its silence, will tell Mumbai's Urdu readers which kind of magazine it turned out to be. Alwida Farooq Syed Sir.