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This article focuses on the educational efforts of Syed Firoz Ashraf in the East Jogeshwari area of Mumbai and places his work in the context of the increasing communalisation of social life and education in a poor working class suburb in Mumbai city. Muslim community has been ghettoised in the metropolis to specific areas especially since the riots of 1992-93, increasing their vulnerability. For more than twenty years ‘Uncle’, as he is affectionately called, has been running after-school classes for children from the working class neighbourhoods of Jogeshwari and Juhu Lane. He has worked within the system to enhance opportunities for higher education for children, and to end the humiliation and indignity associated with educational failure. As Uncle says, there is hope as more and more children break out of the confines of their locality and step out into the world through higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]