Cubbon Reads: A Silent Reading Revolution Spreads Across Parks
On a Saturday in January 2023, Shruti Sah and Harsh Snehanshu had what felt like a whimsical idea. To carry a mat, a few books and cycle over to Cubbon Park to read. Both craved a book club that didn’t center around discussions – after all, they didn’t care for their own engagement with a book to be smothered by a stronger or more articulate opinion. Alerting a few other friends to join them, they planned to read with others. In silence. And commune with trees, while being stimulated in the best possible way.
Soon that Saturday event started gathering momentum. The next Saturday, more folks joined them – including strangers, who in turn reached out to others. Before they knew it, the movement which spread word through @Cubbonreads on Instagram went viral. The six or ten readers had become fifty or sixty, while spreading to other parks. Not just in Bangalore, but across Indian cities – like Mumbai, Mysore, Siliguri and Vizag. Not just in India, but to France, UK, USA and Australia. In just ten months, Cubbon Reads has spread across 70 cities and four continents. There is a Melbournereads, a Bostonreads, and even a Portblairreads.
There are rules. As a non-profit, there are no commercial strings attached. They do not collect data about readers, or permit brands to advertise. The idea, after all, is to subvert our noisy, digitally-distracted lives. Conducted every Saturday from 9 am to 2 pm, they gather at 1:30 pm for a group photograph and conversation. Moreover, Cubbonreads has also spun off other craft and activity groups like Cubbonfolds (origami), Cubbonpaints, Cubbonwrites and Cubbonknits.
Meeting them on a Saturday, at Cubbon Park, I chatted with both founders, about their own lives, while other readers sprawled under trees or huddled in quiet, whispery groups.
Shruti Sah: Family Bonds in Allahabad
Growing up in Allahabad, a city that traffics in history and spiritual jamborees, Shruti Sah recalls a close community of family friends. Of darting in and out of each other’s homes. The weekend chitter chatter and spontaneous mirth helped disparate families paper over contentious home situations. Especially joint family settings that led to inevitable frictions between adult siblings and their offspring.
At home, Shruti’s mother, a qualified Hindustani singer and tanpura player, was intent on guiding her daughters into creative pursuits. Like cooking, baking, music and fashion. “Her imprint was everywhere, even on the linens I’d bring home or the jewelry I’d select,” says Sah. Besides imparting a strong artistic sensibility, her mother was also determined to raise readers.
A Page-Turner’s Memories
Sah cherishes memories of early reading. Of dipping into well-known fairy tales like Goldilocks and the Three Bears or the animal fables of Panchatantra. Of exploring secret passageways with The Five Find-Outers of Enid Blyton, interspersed with seductive midnight snacks at St. Clare’s or Malory Towers. Moreover, Shruti’s aunt, Deepa Agarwal was an author, whose children’s books featured on her stacks.
While Sah’s great-Nani tried to inject religious material into her reading piles, Shruti recalls her mother fiercely championing her independence and choice. Though the act of reading was a non-negotiable, Shruti could pick her own books.
Exploring New Words and Worlds
During her adolescent years, Shruti wanted to break away from the strictures of her joint family. Though Sah majored in Commerce in Grades 11 and 12, she plumbed her passion for reading when choosing her college pathway. Admitted to the prestigious Kamala Nehru College at Delhi, she pursued an undergraduate degree in English Literature.
At college, she relished dwelling in books, but was less enchanted by intense annual exams that harkened back to stern school days. But Delhi was enticing for other reasons. It was after all, her first time away from home, and as she puts it, “her first taste of freedom.” She volunteered at Swechha, a non-profit focused on environmental and social issues. She also enlisted at the World Book Fair, where she reveled in literary interactions.
Journeying From Edelman to the Himalayas
Soon after, she landed at Christ College in Bangalore for a Master’s in Media Studies. She thrived in the assignment-based, practical program. Moreover, she savored the range of food, clothes and people in the South Indian city. Fellow students were not just from all over the country, but from many parts of the world.
After stints at Tehelka and at Jagori, an NGO, in the second year of her Master’s degree, she landed a full-time position at Edelman, one of the largest public relation firms in the country.
There she gleaned corporate how-tos and confronted the pluses and minuses of such jobs: plush five-star stays and thorny office politics.
Keen on extending herself beyond PR, she joined Little Black Book, a lifestyle recommendations platform based in Delhi. Her interactions with Suchita Salwan, the Founder, taught her the power of clarity. When LBB needed someone from their Delhi office to lead the Bangalore brand team, Shruti agreed to move. Landing in the IT capital just a few months before COVID, she soon had to switch to remote work. Instead of frittering away her time at home, she opted to travel to Dharamshala in Himachal, where she lived for three months.
The mountainous town was bereft even of tourists when Sah moved there. Relishing her day-to-day brushes with its brutal sparseness, she frequently set off on hikes – to both clear her mind and reflect on the future. She ended up switching jobs from the Himachal capital, joining Tally where she currently still works on content production. Fortunately, Tally also encourages her other pursuits: which includes an Instagram-based outfit that sells sugar-free and other healthy cakes (called Weird Requests) and Cubbon Reads.
Harsh Snehanshu: A Literary Childhood
Harsh Snehanshu was raised amidst books and bookish people. His Dadi was a trailblazer, the first woman in Bihar’s history to garner an M.A. in Hindi Literature while his grandfather was a college principal. His mother taught economics and his polymath father, as a one-time IAS aspirant, read widely in politics and history beyond his majors in botany and zoology. Though he eventually joined the State Bank of India (SBI), he had built a very diverse home library comprising of science, history and art books.
Their bookshelves ranged from Hindi translations of Russian Masters – like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov – to the Famous Artist Series. Harsh read Tolstoy’s short stories as a child, imbibing the grittiness of Russian peasants as he moved with his family across seven cities, mostly in Bihar and Jharkhand.
Mastering Stories and Symphonies
All along, his father was keen to transmit his affinity for the arts, exposing Harsh to the lives of masters like Da Vinci, Raphael, Cezanne and Delacroix. As well as his regard for Jagjit Singh’s ghazals and Urdu phrases. He even prodded Snehanshu to pen short stories, from the age of 9 or 10: “I filled a 1999 Diary with 50 stories.”
It wasn’t just books. At high school, Harsh mastered the synthesizer, sparking off an abiding interest in all musical instruments. He currently owns some 35 instruments, from the Turkish Oudh to a Filipino flute. But rather than heading towards an Arts Degree, as one might expect of someone so steeped in culture, Snehanshu landed at IIT-Delhi. In retrospect, he believes he was inspired by the biographies he read of prominent scientists and mathematicians like C. V. Raman, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Har Gobind Khorana.
At one point, he was so smitten with the Sciences and with works like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, he recalls disparaging friends who relished Harry Potter.
Penning a Bestseller Romcom at IIT
Such snobbery about other genres was to vanish inside IIT Delhi, when he encountered Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone. The wildly successful book goaded Snehanshu to take his own writing more seriously. Till then, he had been dabbling with a blog, posting whimsical takes on life and philosophy. Besides, around then, other authors like Tushar Raheja had confirmed with his bestselling Anything, For You Ma’am that IITians could juggle not just algebraic variables, but the prickly vagaries of love.
Harsh sensed that he too could knock out a Romcom. Initially, posting chapters on his blog, he broadcast new releases on Orkut (Facebook’s progenitor). His protagonist was someone that many male IITians could relate with: a wimp who desperately sought dating advice from friends. The blog, titled Oops, soon acquired 60,000 readers, going viral across the nation’s IITs. Soon enough, Srishti Publishers reached out. Snehanshu was asked to meet the owner in Delhi. Without reading a single line of the manuscript, the owner snapped up his book: “With a 10% royalty, priced at 100 Rs.”
Nine months later, the printed book arrived at Harsh’s doorstep. Srishti had also divined one of the reasons for the success of certain works. Apparently, all bestsellers in India had 19 characters in the title. So Oops had been turned into Oops “I” Fell in Love. The book became a bestseller, selling one lakh copies over two years. Srishti commissioned a sequel, and eventually Snehanshu created a trilogy centered around the same characters. “The couple got married at 22,” he says with a chuckle.
Adventures Across 22 States
Harsh, in the meanwhile, had started reading more widely. Already exposed to literature as a child, he now plowed into other works. Like The Great Gatsby and Midnight’s Children. He had also spawned a startup in his fourth year at IIT, so he planned to write about his failure. Commissioned by Penguin Random House, the book sold 6000 copies. While searching for a purposeful next step, he decided to take a year off and travel. Since he had a fanbase spread across the country, he opted to stay with readers.
Traveling on a shoe-string budget, he forayed into diverse spots across 22 states. While he was only 22 years then, his hosts were often younger – students in the 8th or 12th grade, who were ecstatic about a favorite author visiting and staying in their homes. Looking back at his peripatetic year, he acknowledges that travel is often romanticized, but is more fatiguing in practice. But there were positive spinoffs. For one thing, he became more trusting of strangers: “Travel humanizes the world and makes you more liberal.”
Beyond that, the trip had seeded a yearning to study further. Admitted into the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, he spent a year immersed in the liberal arts. Taught by stellar professors like Ramachandra Guha, Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Urvashi Butalia, the program accorded a glimpse into fields like psychology, sociology, literature and history. Since he had been awarded a scholarship, he was able to explore riskier pathways. He spent six months as an exchange student at Science Po, Paris, where he studied Urban Policy.
Parisian Dreams And Entrepreneurial Realities
During his time in the French capital, he explored many museums, excitedly calling his father to report, “I’m standing in front of a Gaugin painting!” He noticed too how accommodating public spaces were in Paris. Contemplating how freely he had roamed around the city, he started a new venture in India, called “Flatabout” – sort of like a Tripadvisor for flats. However, the company did not take off. He then started another called “Your Quote” – a short form writing platform – where users could post short pieces.
Your Quote resonated with writers and readers. After raising $ 1 Million initially, the platform currently has 6 million users, a community that’s been forged over six years. The venture is profitable and self-sustaining.
Bookmarking Connections
In addition to curating Cubbon Reads, Shruti and Harsh have currently co-founded a new startup called Bookmark – a dating app for readers. This idea was inspired by Cubbon Reads, and will be released mid-November.
They also run “Midnight Cycling”, a nighttime slow cycling movement and “Pretty Old Cars”, an initiative that maps the location of vintage cars and curates walking tours for car geeks.
With Cubbon Reads, they hope the idea continues to mushroom in an organic manner, till it can sustain itself without their presence.
Links:
https://www.instagram.com/cubbonreads/?hl=en