Inside Pustaka, Hyderabad’s new neighbourhood library and activity centre

Pustaka, a caller room successful Manikonda, Hyderabad, greets visitors with a generous conception of children’s books, stocking volumes of Amar Chitra Katha, Tintin, Roald Dahl and respective young big fabrication titles. “Children signifier the bulk of our visitors and readers. Some halt by connected their mode backmost location from schoolhouse and walk an hr astatine the speechmaking room,” says Rohith Kesharaju, the librarian. A tiny speechmaking country doubles up arsenic an enactment centre during storytelling and publication speechmaking sessions.

Pustaka (@pustaka_hyderabad connected Instagram) opened its doors successful precocious September and positions itself arsenic a room for each property groups. A brainchild of Mallika Pathi, a CPA auditor, and originative graphic decorator Divya Pathi, the 1,000 quadrate ft room has implicit 3,000 books, curated by Sofia Bhattacharya and Abhishek Shankar. The books present spell good beyond the accustomed suspects 1 would find successful retail bookstores. Pustaka is simply a caller summation to Hyderabad pursuing Wild Geese (@wildgeese.library) successful Nallagandla and Appuworld (@appuworldlibrary) successful Financial District.

The founders of Pustaka were wide that they wanted to stoke curiosity successful each property group. Segregated broadly into history, biography and memoirs, arts and culture, history, literate fiction, romance, enigma and thrillers, among different sections, the postulation includes fashionable and uncommon titles.

For instance, successful the arts conception 1 would find Syd Field’s Four Screenplays: A Study successful American Screenplays, arsenic good arsenic Gayatri Chatterjee’s Awara that heavy dives into Raj Kapoor’s eponymous film.

A vintage postulation features 400 well-thumbed classics. Members are encouraged to work these titles lone astatine the library, fixed the fragility of these books. Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Kipling’s India - Rudyard Kipling’s archetypal anthology successful India, and Tony Barr’s Acting For The Camera are among the titles.

Pustaka offers varied memberships for beginners and avid readers, opening ₹299 a month. For those who unrecorded further distant from Manikonda and whitethorn sojourn the room sparingly, determination is simply a time walk enactment astatine ₹99. The room has a transportation work enactment for those who similar location transportation of books.

The thought of Pustaka emerged erstwhile Divya, parent of a five-year-old, observed the deficiency of entree to a scope of books successful respective families. Through the library, Mallika and Divya anticipation to foster interactive sessions.

“We privation to support these sessions affordable to everyone. When we learnt that immoderate storytellers complaint a precocious fee, we decided to invitation members who we cognize tin narrate stories good and promote them to beryllium storytellers,” says Mallika.

Divya observes however parents and grandparents accompanying children are getting backmost to reading, and adds, “We anticipation to summation the postulation of books, including Telugu titles. We privation much radical to disconnect from their integer screens and walk clip reading.”

Pustaka volition soon unfastened a tiny cafe. The semipermanent program is to unfastened a concatenation of neighbourhood libraries successful the city.