Prateek Gupta inherited a love for poetry from his father. He was just 15 when he stumbled upon his old diary, and the journey began...
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Prateek Gupta inherited a love for poetry from his father. He was just 15 when he stumbled upon his old diary, and the journey began. "A year later, I had a major crush on a girl who didn't even know I existed and poetry gave me an outlet. Ghalib, Mir, Faraz and Faiz were my companions to share the melancholy. The more I wrote, the more I had the desire to read," he says. He would devour poems and stories in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. "Storytelling should be personal, stirring, emotional, and even biased. That's how I write and that's how I like to read."
A meeting of the Bombay chapter of Broke Bibliophiles
Gupta, an engineer and poet who goes by @whitecollarpoet on Instagram, is one of the many bibliophiles in the city. Now, you can know more about people like Gupta and their book-related journeys, through a four-month-old Facebook page, Bibliophiles of Bombay (BOB). "I meet a lot of people through book clubs, and every person has a story about how they started and what they read.
I wanted to highlight these stories, so others could get inspired or learn from their reading journeys," says the Mumbai-based founder Nirav Mehta.
Nirav Mehta
Mehta, 26, is also a co-founder of the Broke Bibliophiles Bombay chapter, which completes a year this month. BOB is his pet project, one that has a new person from the city telling their journey of being a bibliophile every week. It could be a yoga teacher discovering a book recommended by a stranger, a Kindle fan who credits the device with helping him experiment with genres, a journalist introducing a love for reading to her son or the story of discovering reading in boarding school.
"I choose people based on instinct," says Mehta. "It usually is someone or something that inspires me to read more or introduces me to something new."
Mehta posts every Friday - he photographs readers himself, creating a bank of images, and later, asks them for their stories. Although he has no fixed plan for the future, he hopes the group grows organically.
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