Anne Frank wrote in ‘Diary of a Young Girl`: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Three young Indians – Jatin Lalit Singh and Malvika Aggarwal (both final-year law students, Galgotias University, Delhi), and Abhishek Vyas, law graduate, Gujarat National Law University – are doing just that. In the worst pandemic witnessed in a hundred years, in which more than 3.8 million people have lost their lives worldwide, the trio, the force behind the Bansa Community Library, is improving the world one book at a time.

To urbane Indians privileged to have had access to books in the home, reading is a leisurely pursuit. Academic reading and rote learning is thrust on them because of the way Indian education is designed, but reading for pleasure provides relief and escape from the mundane, often into fictional worlds, enlarging the mind and allowing the imagination to travel widely for little more than the price of a book, whether owned, borrowed or filched.