My City Didn’t Have A Book Club, So I Started One

Hits and misses, and a year of self-pity later, I finally am building my own community.

I moved to Hyderabad three years ago.

As someone who was born, brought up, and spent her entire life in small towns of Assam, this move was a turning point. It was my first time in a metro city with big buildings, glowing lights, four-tier road systems, and a night-life most Indian cities can only dream of.

But how to make the most of the metropolitan experience if you don’t have a community?

It would be nice to have a friend to go on heritage walks with, take shopping trips at the mall, try out different items of street food, and attend cultural meet-ups the city is so famous for.

Most people turn to their jobs to form friendships. But for a full-time writer, whose everyday routine is sitting in front of a computer and tapping away at the keyboard, how can I hope to make connections?

That’s when the idea of starting a book club came to me.

I love reading, and I love connecting with readers to nerd about books. Why not find a community of readers I can form friendships with?

That seemed like a no-brainer. But even then, it took me three years of living in Hyderabad to finally start my book club. Why, and how the journey was like? Read on.

The first attempt was a joint venture

I’d been talking to Vidya for months before I even moved to the city. She and I worked for the same startup. What started as a casual introduction during a group meeting turned to long text messages where we ended up sharing our life goals, dreams, and aspirations.

When I moved to the city, she was the first person I met. We had a lot in common, among which, was our love for reading. We decided to start a book club together.

And so, in July 2022, the Hyderabad Book Club was born.

It wasn’t much. I invited a few acquaintances, she invited some of her reader friends, and we picked a cafe that was pretty much at the center of the city.

On the day of the book club, seven people turned up.

Vidya and I had prepared notes on how to keep the crowd engaged and thought of endless games we could play. But the way the conversation kept flowing that day at our table, we needn’t have worried at all.