An App that Takes You to the Past!

Hyderabad techie Syed Khalid Saifullah pioneers an app to commemorate Muslim freedom fighters.

Lack of knowledge about Indian Muslim freedom fighters has prompted a city-based techie to initiate an application that focuses solely on their role in India’s freedom struggle. The mobile app named ‘Muslim Freedom Fighters’ was launched on the eve of the 70th year of the country’s independence and has already received more than a thousand downloads on Google Play Store. “I felt that Muslims in the country do not have role models from their own community”, says said Syed Khalid Saifullah, the founder, who says that they should know about the people who sacrificed for India’s freedom. “When I googled Muslim freedom fighters, I could find only a handful of names like Tipu Sultan”, he says. The aim of the app is to change the prevailing notion that Muslims did not contribute to the struggle for India’s freedom.
Khalid designed the app in a way that makes learning interesting and fun. The app has 155 different levels dedicated to the same number of Indian Muslim freedom fighters, with each level containing stories, pictures and a quiz based on the information provided. The 155 freedom fighters are divided into various categories with rulers, martyrs, bureaucrats, journalists and poets among others. Each level has a quiz comprising five questions and if a player answers three of them correctly, he or she advances to the next level, although the information from all the levels can be accessed without taking up the quiz. Once one clears all the levels, a certificate of appreciation will be sent to the user, says Khalid, who adds that more than 60 per cent of the downloads have been from people of other communities.