How The Booknerds Are Building A Book Lovers Community in Dehradun

The Booknerds is a literary start-up based out of Dehradun founded by Rohan Raj and Neha Raj in 2015 with the vision to connect book lovers in India and beyond.  The Booknerds is an offline and online community of bibliophiles, authors and poets who have come together to organize over 100 meet-ups, and hosted more than 50 authors in Dehradun and Lucknow till date. Over the past three years, they have collaborated with publishing houses such as Penguin, Harper Collins, Fingerprint, Rupa, Pepperscript, Pirates, Grapevine, Srishti and many more.

Rohan is an academic, bibliophile, tech-enthusiast, music connoisseur and a sports buff takes care of the operations of The Booknerds. Neha brings her corporate experience to the social initiative. It all started a few years ago when Rohan and Neha were looking out for a book lover’s community in Dehradun and were unable to find one. They thought it was an opportunity for them to start building a community for people who love books. 

 They have gone beyond organizing readings and partnered for premium literary festivals like Valley of Words International Literature and Arts Festival. They were social media outreach partners for the Rupa Publication Book Fair at World Integrity Centre in 2017.

The Booknerds have also organized exciting endeavors like book donation drives. In one such initiative the book donation drive was inaugurated by the then Minister of Primary Education and Sports, and partnered with Pacific Mall, Sarv Shiksha Abhiyaan and the Govt.of Uttarakhand for a fifteen day book donation drive named Doon Book Bank wherein over 1,00,000 books were donated from across Uttarakhand.

The team have launched a reading space in Dehradun on January 21, 2018 that serves as a home for Book Readings, Book Launches and a gamut of literary activities being conducted in Dehradun. To reach out to more people and encourage them to read the team has recently launched The Booknerds Podcast to bring the best literary content to bibliophiles with storytelling, poetry, author interviews, book discussions and so much more. The Booknerds  aims to revolutionize the reading experience for bibliophiles and use technology to reach out to more people and encourage book reading.

The Booknerds Community meets every weekend (usually on Sunday) in Dehradun at different cafes around town and once a month in Lucknow. We pick books by voting so it is a very democratic process. The group loves coffee and tea. We do not have food at the hangouts. We always have a moderator so that no one diverts from the discussion at hand. We also have interactive sessions with authors from time to time.

The initial years of starting the initiative was building a book reading community so they chose mostly popular titles but eventually they started curating the readings more thoughtfully and became more inclusive with choosing the books to read. They have also started organizing readings for Hindi and Urdu books to make their community more inclusive. This has led to celebrating the greats such as Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Mirza Ghalib and Munshi Premchand. Their sessions are open to children as well. They have conducted comic book special reading series too. They have a core team, which organizes everything from searching for the coolest hangouts to curating lit fests to getting the best authors to interact with the group, and managing social media. The challenges that they have faced in running the initiative has been mostly monetary but they seem to have always found a way to get it going smoothly.