Cubbon Reads

Cubbon Reads A quiet reading community. We meet every Saturday, 9am-2pm, in Cubbon Park to silently read together.

It is now 3 years and 9 months since Cubbon Reads began. You might have joined us for our first (tiny) book stack. Or yo...
02/10/2026

It is now 3 years and 9 months since Cubbon Reads began. You might have joined us for our first (tiny) book stack. Or you might have joined us halfway through this journey. The first time you came, you probably struggled to find the big tree. Now you make a bee-line for it. Your first time here, you set up your may in what you thought was a good spot - only to awkwardly drag it elsewhere to hide from the sun - or maybe to seek it. Now look at you, you have a patch of grass you call yours.

You’ve watched books come and go out of trend in our book stack - from Hoover’s It Ends With Us to Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me. You’ve been through quite a few books yourself - you’ve finished some, abandoned some and added many more to your to-read list.

You’ve been with us through the clear skies of summer, the sprinkles of monsoon, the crunchy leaves of autumn and the wonderfully cold winters. You’ve been with us during our best times and you know of the troubles Cubbon Reads has faced. You’ve seen us grow from a fledgling gathering in a park to a mature community that paves the way for other Reads chapters throughout the world.

All this to say, dear Regular of Cubbon Reads, that we see you. We notice you. We notice your absence. It is hard for us to fathom what CR means to you but know that every time you’ve visited has been a sheet of evidence in our growing stack that CR is the community it set out to be. We appreciate you. We are happy that you have found something valuable here. And we hope to you again this Saturday near tree 3265 as always.

📸: Gopikrishnan jj (jagga jasoos) Dee Srimayee

📝: No

P.S: A shoutout to our regular, Nidhi, who told us what Cubbon Reads meant to her and inspired us to write this caption

We are so happy with all the submissions we have received so far. Thank you for taking out the time.The campaign is stil...
22/09/2026

We are so happy with all the submissions we have received so far. Thank you for taking out the time.

The campaign is still on! Our DMs are open till mid-October. Dust those old family albums, bring out photos from the analog era where books peep.

Either DM us or email us at [email protected]

I came across this sentence recently, ‘It’s easier to domesticate dogs than men’. That got me thinking. Does the word ‘d...
21/09/2026

I came across this sentence recently, ‘It’s easier to domesticate dogs than men’. That got me thinking. Does the word ‘domesticate’ apply to humans as well, and not just animals? This got me scouring the internet, and I came across Merriam-Webster defining it as ‘to train someone to behave in an appropriate way at home (humorous)’. What I realized as I went deeper into the rabbit hole was not funny at all.

My search got me to reading an excerpt from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The author explains how early humans moved away from hunting and gathering to cultivation and started growing wheat. While this was a convenient and steady dietary source, it also came with issues such as repetitive labour, infectious diseases due to overcrowding, and poorer diets.

In an attempt to domesticate wheat, it was the humans who were unintentionally domesticated. Humans had to reorganize their lives around wheat, and subject themselves to the monotony of planting, protecting, storing and spreading.

12,000 years later, a haunting parallel to this theory is unfolding before us today. AI, much like wheat, promises to make our lives much simpler, be it with writing an email or creating a picture. Wheat rewarded humans for reorganizing their lives around it, and AI does the same when we give it another task. With every prompt we feed it, we gradually lose our ability to perform the task, increasing our dependency.

When was the last time you wrote an email all by yourself? When was the last time you sifted through Stack Overflow to get a bug fixed? Our reliance on LLMs is pushing us towards being domesticated. The inability to function without AI starts with things mundane, like fixing typos, but soon can snowball into something much bigger, where you may even end up outsourcing your emotions to a model running on a random GPU in a water-guzzling data center.

Continued in the pinned comment!

✍️: Gopikrishnan
📸: No Gopikrishnan

How a simple suggestion to follow a trend gave birth to this beautiful archival project! DM us high-res photographs from...
16/09/2026

How a simple suggestion to follow a trend gave birth to this beautiful archival project!

DM us high-res photographs from your family albums from the 80s. And we will build that archive for everyone here.

The past few weeks have seemed to orbit artificial intelligence, to a degree, where each week seems to depict another as...
14/09/2026

The past few weeks have seemed to orbit artificial intelligence, to a degree, where each week seems to depict another astronomical leap; bringing another declaration of what it could solve, replace, recreate or reinvent. Is the future really promising to arrive faster than we begin to make any sense of it?

We read, that large-language-models are edging closer to problems that have puzzled mathematicians and scientists for generations. We are watching researchers debate whether we are witnessing the first tremors of a future, perhaps, dystopian, that may rearrange everything we understand about knowledge, work, and intelligence itself.

Then, elsewhere on the same quaint spectrum, artificial intelligence busies itself imagining what we might have looked like in the 80s.

One of the seemingly many things that binds these ends of the spectrum together - data centres drinking astonishing quantities of water to sustain this new age of computation, correspondingly as the devices in our palms grow more expensive, more elaborate, more theatrical, folding-unfolding before us, as though the future must always arrive with a trick.
And amid all this acceleration, I keep returning to something that has changed remarkably little.

A book, mats radially spread around the big old tree, a cup of coffee cooling beside a half-read page, a gathering of people choosing, for a few hours, to read.
No surprises, for almost three years now, that has been the quiet rhythm of Cubbon Reads.

The art of reading remains perennially simple, yet inexhaustible, and so does Cubbon Reads. I see people arrive and disappear. I see mats changing. I see coffee mugs changing. I see books pass from poetry to politics, fiction to philosophy, history to science. I see someone carrying an umbrella to bargain with the afternoon heat, only to eventually surrender to the generous shade of Cubbon Park.

And, canonically, the ritual of reading remains as one of our most revered and enjoyed pastimes, irrespective of time - be it the 40s, or the 80s, or this new century.

🌻Continued in the comments

✍️ Shamik
📸 Shamik No

When we begin writing a caption, we go by a simple maxim: keep it simple, keep it personal.Earlier, our captions were mo...
09/09/2026

When we begin writing a caption, we go by a simple maxim: keep it simple, keep it personal.

Earlier, our captions were more about what happened in a particular edition. The weather, the attendance, hints of rain if any, the books people got, and any particular reader that caught our ears when we went around clicking photographs.

Over the last few months, our captions have become deeply personal. They tell the story of the one writing it—their relationship with the city, with the park, with books. And sometimes, when one has talked about oneself quite a bit (me!), it becomes about a reader who made Cubbon Reads memorable for us.

Today's story is about a reader. A 68-year-old cancer survivor who happens to be a painter. He came with his wife and they were seen sitting on folding chairs. He was reading Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste while his wife was reading Sundarkand from the Ramayana. Apart from the book, there was one giant canvas rolled up, safely tucked on a tree trunk. They don't allow us to climb trees, but it seems rolled up canvases are fine.

After an hour of quiet reading, he shyly walked up to the stack and instead of handing over his book, he handed over this giant canvas roll, asking us curators to unfurl. And lo! It was a painting of Cubbon Reads. 10 ft by 5 ft, acrylic on Canvas. A painting that took him three months, and it travelled with him from his hometown Dhanbad to Goa where his daughter lives to his son in Bangalore, where he kept on with the brushwork.

When asked why he chose to paint Cubbon Reads of all the places, he had a one-line-answer, "So I feel I'm always in Cubbon among hundreds when I read at home." Here's the greatest gift we have received from a reader. Thank you Sudhanshu ji (Sudhanshu Shekhar Pathak) for making Cubbon Reads a part of your home, and your art a part of us.

📝Harsh Snehanshu
📷 No

One of my favourite parts of coming to Cubbon Reads is the book distribution. There is something exciting about looking ...
31/08/2026

One of my favourite parts of coming to Cubbon Reads is the book distribution. There is something exciting about looking through the pile and finding books you’ve never heard of, books that suddenly add to your already impossible TBR, books that make you curious about a world you haven’t entered yet.

But after a while, I realised something. I rarely saw anyone picking up children’s books , which made me wonder, when did we start leaving those books behind? At what point did colourful covers, talking animals, impossible worlds and stories meant for children become something we were supposed to outgrow?

And when I spot a book that I read during my childhood I immediately think of my favourite book; Harry Potter. For the longest time, I genuinely believed Hogwarts was real. I remember believing that one day, somehow, my letter would arrive. Looking back, it makes me laugh a little. It was silly, of course, but there was so much happiness in believing it. That feeling that something magical could still happen to you. That innocence we carried, without even knowing we had it.

And I think that’s what happens when we return to children’s books as adults. The story remains the same, but we aren’t.
The adventure is still there, the friendships are still there,t he heartbreak still hurts. But somewhere between the lines, we begin noticing things our younger selves couldn’t have understood. We question the characters, their choices, their worlds. We bring our own experiences into stories that once seemed so simple.

Maybe that’s why these books stay with us for so long. We all have them; the books we grew up with, the ones we still talk about years later, the ones whose characters feel like old friends. There is a sprinkle of magic in them. They have this strange ability to pull out memories we’ve buried somewhere, while being thrown into this puddle of adulthood.

🌻 contd. in the comments

✍️: Naganjali Hegde
📸: Naganjali Hegde Gopikrishnan Dee Srimayee No

One of my favourite parts of coming to Cubbon Reads is the book distribution. There is something exciting about looking ...
31/08/2026

One of my favourite parts of coming to Cubbon Reads is the book distribution. There is something exciting about looking through the pile and finding books you’ve never heard of, books that suddenly add to your already impossible TBR, books that make you curious about a world you haven’t entered yet.

But after a while, I realised something. I rarely saw anyone picking up children’s books , which made me wonder, when did we start leaving those books behind? At what point did colourful covers, talking animals, impossible worlds and stories meant for children become something we were supposed to outgrow?

And when I spot a book that I read during my childhood I immediately think of my favourite book; Harry Potter. For the longest time, I genuinely believed Hogwarts was real. I remember believing that one day, somehow, my letter would arrive. Looking back, it makes me laugh a little. It was silly, of course, but there was so much happiness in believing it. That feeling that something magical could still happen to you. That innocence we carried, without even knowing we had it.

And I think that’s what happens when we return to children’s books as adults. The story remains the same, but we aren’t.

The adventure is still there, the friendships are still there,t he heartbreak still hurts. But somewhere between the lines, we begin noticing things our younger selves couldn’t have understood. We question the characters, their choices, their worlds. We bring our own experiences into stories that once seemed so simple.

Maybe that’s why these books stay with us for so long. We all have them; the books we grew up with, the ones we still talk about years later, the ones whose characters feel like old friends. There is a sprinkle of magic in them. They have this strange ability to pull out memories we’ve buried somewhere, while being thrown into this puddle of adulthood.

contd. in comments. 🌼

✍️: Naganjali Hegde
📷: No Gopikrishnan Srimayee Dee Naganjali Hegde

Last Saturday, I visited Cubbon Reads after a month. As its founding curator, such long absences are not ideal, but I be...
24/08/2026

Last Saturday, I visited Cubbon Reads after a month. As its founding curator, such long absences are not ideal, but I believe a community truly becomes a community when it can function without its parents.

After being present every Saturday for the first two years since we began in 2023, we handed its reins to our readers. Every few months, a new batch of curators arrives & becomes the custodians & documentarians of this intimate community.

So last weekend, I greeted the current curators, ceremoniously splayed my mat & began reading the brilliant White Elephant by Jeyamohan.

Alas, my attention was ephemeral. A couple of blokes dropped in & began commenting how reading in a park is “performative”. They continued performing this word, disrupting everyone. I moved away to read but couldn't. The word kept ringing in my ears. Are we?

Performative. It's not the first time someone used this word for us. And we have a point of view!

Reading isn't performative. Reading alone in a public space, neither. It's a solitary activity that creates a cocoon around us. Most readers come alone, rarely click themselves & remain silent. So where does it turn into a performance?

It's because of us. Please blame us! We turn it into a spectacle.

We photograph readers reading. We make reels. We post on socials. But you know what? We do it on purpose. Normalising reading outdoors helps new readers pick up books.

Cubbon Reads is democratic by ethos. A democracy isn't complete until it serves its lowest denominator—the minority. For us, that's the non-reader.

If you're already a reader, you don't need us. You've probably been exposed to books early, have a library at home, and read in your leisure time.

But for someone who doesn't read, a photograph or reel of a reader lounging in a free park can spark the desire to read, perhaps for the first time.

It may be performative for the elites, but it's aspirational for the rest. For a community whose mission is to make the world read, it's when everyone wants to read that fulfills our cause.

So while we croon "performative" all we want, just one request: don't disturb the ones reading. Some of us might be doing it for the first time!

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