The Booklet Guy

Not all love stories happen at first sight. Some of them grow on you slowly and then joyfully entangle you for life. For me, reading is that love.

Thanks to my elder brother who in my childhood, instructed my friends not to bring any birthday gifts for me other than books! I hated him then for doing it but now years later as I look back, I know it was his best gift to me.

I’ve loved books; be it Stephen Covey or Gary Keller or the 100s of other books I’ve read. But as the years passed by, I found lesser and lesser time and more and more excuses to not read the books I always wanted to. It took 3 failed new year resolutions of reading one book a week and a general angst of youth reading useless stuff on the internet to start “Booklet”.

Booklet is on a mission; a mission to cultivate the habit of reading amongst the youth of our country. Mission “Make India Read” is what I like to call it. Every week I read a bestselling book, make a summary of it called Booklet and send it on WhatsApp (text +audio) so that people can read/listen to the summary of a fat book in just 20 mins! Earlier this year, on World Book Day, we launched an Android app to manage the increasing number of readers..

When I first started sending Booklet, I was the only one writing it and 10 of my friends who read it. Today, we are a team of two (Siddhesh & me) and 13000 enthusiasts (not a single rupee spent on marketing) who eagerly wait for Wednesday!

As for me, reading for others is a bigger incentive than reading for myself. The challenge of reading one book a week is nothing compared to the joy I get when a reader tells me how productive I’ve made her commute from Andheri to Churchgate. Using my love for books to bring a change in the lives of people is a huge social return on investment, don’t you think!

– As told by Amrut Deshmukh

13620114_1738722893077634_270856609893415453_n

_________________________

Never miss a story – Get it in your inbox every week!

 

Facebook Comments

Next Post

Previous Post

1 Comment

  1. Richa April 18, 2017

    Hi,
    I have subscribed because I really like the idea, I too read, sometimes more sometimes less due to work life. But I love to read. Past few months I have spent in trying to get the people in my office to read books for many reasons, mainly to improve their communication skills and to have something other than their monotonous life to think of. They don’t seem interested in anything, I want them to know things in order to have interest in them. If they don’t know what ‘good’ is out there for them, they won’t have the curiosity to find out more or the ‘want’ to experience it. Reading is SO MUCH more than non-readers could ever think it is.
    Your summaries and videos are supposed to help me a lot as I hold sessions with them 4 times a week.

Leave a Reply

© 2017 The Other Side

Theme by Anders Norén
http://the-other-side.in/2016/09/25/make-india-read/
the-other-side.in
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-39
41497
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FD42QE4ERCKONYURBTI25IBGN6L2HIOT
<urn:uuid:bbec5647-93c6-4c6d-98e1-a39ced3cd083>
2017-09-22T15:11:11Z
108.179.246.105
text/html
sha1:DOPR2MSWM6BRXJD7OZRH424GW6SFPR7K
<urn:uuid:54904201-af40-4671-931f-4f3efede3a67>
http://the-other-side.in/2016/09/25/make-india-read/
length
response
<urn:uuid:474d970a-5357-4dca-9e5f-b0a1da44a9e6>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-150-110-222.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-39
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf