The community that became home: Nine years of Broke Bibliophiles – Bombay Chapter book club

In 2016, when I first imagined Broke Bibliophiles – Bombay Chapter or B3C, I was not an architect of grand literary movements. There was no blueprint, no soaring ambition. There was only a yearning – a simple desire to gather around the warmth of words and build a refuge against the world’s relentless pace.

The first meeting was hesitant, almost like the opening lines of a novel that doesn’t yet know where it’s going. A handful of strangers in a café, each clutching a book close to their hearts, as though revealing a fragment of their soul. Conversations meandered, stories unfolded, and by the time the evening gave way to twilight, we were no longer strangers.

What began as an impromptu gathering soon evolved into an unshakable ritual. Book discussions spilled into long coffee and beer sessions, stories overlapped with personal anecdotes, and literature, so often confined to the private act of reading, became a shared experience, a conversation rather than a monologue.

In the years that followed, the club transformed, expanding not in numbers alone, but in depth, in meaning. The magic was not just in the books we read, but in the lives we touched. I saw friendships take root in the margins of dog-eared novels,...

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