Meet me at the park

Twenty-two-year-old Bengaluru-based software engineer Babitha Kumari graduated from college in June. Like most young adults, she saw her core group of friends move cities for jobs. Soon, the familiar faces that crowded her life at university disappeared only to pop up on her phone as texts, DMs, and video calls. Sounds familiar? We live in a time where our online selves seem to be taking over, leaving little to no social interaction with the world outside. But Kumari decided to reconnect with the real world, and signed up for Cubbon Meets—an in-person book club that meets every Saturday at Cubbon Park.

Kumari isn’t alone. World over, small hobbyist groups seem to be slowly but surely popping the virtual bubble. These budding groups are encouraging people to leave their screens behind and engage in IRL activities, be it reading, sculpting, crocheting, metalworks, or board games. The whole point is to meet people and be a part of a community. “I have met some amazing people through Cubbon Meets. For instance, I met someone who seemed to be an older version of me. We spoke about everything under the sun, and it felt good to be heard by someone who just gets you,” Kumari says.

About 8,000 km away, in Amsterdam, 28-year-old business consultant Lakshmanan Ayyappan came across The Offline Club (@theoffline_club) online. Here, people get together for group activities that include reading, knitting, or even playing board games. “My work is mostly online, and sometimes I feel a bit disconnected from people. Since everything is online, I would often wonder what kind of activities I would enjoy. Joining this club came from a curiosity to know more about myself and a desire to form real connections,” shares Ayyappan.

Like Kumari and Ayyappan, most of our lives, be it work or play, are heavily entangled with the Internet—sharing that pitch deck, booking a cab, ordering a meal, binging a show, swiping for dates, or arguing on your family group. According to recent data, in 2024 people in India spent an average of six hours and 49 minutes online daily, which is more than the worldwide average by 11 minutes. Interestingly, people aged between 16 and 24 years worldwide spent the most time online—more than seven hours—closely followed by those aged 25 and 34.

Last year in July, Venkatesh Gupta took to X to talk about meeting a 35-year-old software engineer working at Microsoft in Bengaluru, India, who drives a rickshaw on weekends as a way to escape loneliness. The post went viral, and while there were questions about the incident actually taking place, it sparked off a chain of conversations about the experience of living in big cities. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared that loneliness is a global public health concern, one as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Increasing internet dependence is leading to a rising feeling of disconnectedness, loneliness and isolation, especially amongst zoomers and millennials today.

In December 2022, Shruti Sah, a marketing professional, and Harsh Snehanshu, an entrepreneur, decided to head to Bengaluru’s Cubbon Park to read books together, and invited friends to join them. Within a few weeks, it turned into @cubbonreads, a silent reading movement, with sister communities sprouting across India and abroad. In 2023, 31-year-old Victoria Navina started a reading community in Kuala Lumpur (@kualalumpurreads), where people gather every Saturday at Perdana Botanical Garden to meet other readers. “In Malaysia, more book clubs and craft communities are forming for people looking for meaningful offline connections,” she says. Some have travelled over 40 kms to join her book club, Navina reveals.

Studies have shown that the impact of even momentary interactions on mental health is profound. A simple ‘hello’ to a stranger on the road or a brief conversation with them can boost people’s happiness levels, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Social Psychological And Personality Science. The study also showed that virtual communication leads to a sense of isolation that is making people less happy today, compared to the analogue world where strangers interacted more with each other.

“Our default mode has been online. The rise in concepts like ‘touch grass’, and ‘quiet mode’ are proof of the consequence of being chronically online,” says Deepali Dwarakanath, 25, co-curator of Cubbon Meets (@cubbonmeets). This sister chapter of Cubbon Reads started in March 2024 with 12 attendees. Now, they are a community of 20 to 25 people who meet regularly to talk about literature, art, pop culture, and food. Rasswanth Shankar, 23, co-curator of Cubbon Meets, adds that the rise in loneliness seems to be closely connected to the loss of ‘third spaces’—places people visit regularly that aren’t work or home. These third spaces help build community, foster relationships, and give our lives meaning. “That’s exactly what many communities are trying to bring back,” he says.

People are seeking each other out now based on common interests. For instance, those interested in board games have formed communities such as Bengaluru’s ReRoll Board Games (@rerollblr) and Mumbai’s Board Games Adda (@boardgameadda) for weekly meetups. For those interested in interactive workshops, and activities such as treasure hunts and weekend trips, there are communities such as We Play (@weplay.blr).

Cubbon Folds (@cubbonfolds), Cubbon Paints (@cubbonpaints), Kochi Reads (@kochireads), Montreal Reads (@montrealreads), Toronto Downtown Reads (@torontodowntownreads), and Yarn Tales: HSR Crochets (@hsr_crochets) are all part of a growing list of hobbyist groups that are now thriving across the globe.

Catering to the rising interest in in-person meetings and a search for micro-communities, recent social apps in the market have also been focusing less on dating, and more on building platonic connections. For instance, TimeLeft, recently launched in India, is currently active in 300 cities and connects people with likeminded strangers with whom you can get dinner. While Airbnb Experiences introduces travellers to local communities in the form of cooking classes, street food walks, beer sampling tours, and so on. Come May 2025, it is opening itself up to local participation as well.

When 28-year-old architect Poojitha Yathiraj visited Kuala Lumpur earlier this year, Kuala Lumpur Reads made it possible for her to interact with like-minded locals. “If you go as a tourist, you get to see only a part of the experience. At the reading community, it was easier to talk to people because we had a common interest—books. From there, the conversations I engaged in were the highlight of the trip,” she explains.

Maker’s Asylum in Goa embraced the ‘third space’ back in 2013. Here, everyone from artists to engineers come together to share tools and knowhow to make ideas happen. Equipped with a woodworking lab, an electronics lab (where people create robots), and laser-cutting, 3D printing and welding machines, etc, the space has a wide variety of activities and skills that people can engage in. “People come down to physically meet everyone, find a community and other people like themselves and be able to build stuff,” says Vaibhav Chhabra, 35, co-founder of Maker’s Asylum. “It used to be a niche space that few people knew about. Now, there is definitely more interest in this culture where they work with physical tools and make something with their hands,” he adds.

However, for many these communities bring out the joy of meeting people, says Pranav Temburnikar, 31, curator of Montreal Reads. Meeting like-minded people in a new place and forging a community helps him enjoy his city more. For 22-year-old student Akriti KC, who has been attending Vadodara Paints (@vadodarapaints), a community meetup in the city for people to get together weekly and create art, the gatherings have been about getting to hear stories of diverse people. She explains, “My main motivation to go for the meetups is meeting people. I met someone who broke into an abandoned hospital once, and also a psychiatrist studying animal behaviour. Everyone has such interesting experiences.”

Shankar concludes, “There’s something beautiful about these temporary relationships; they matter just as much as our more permanent relationships.” When people gather regularly in a shared space, familiarity leads to more meaningful connections, and that in turn creates a micro-community. And this growing shift towards in-person meetings, despite or even because of constant technological advances, emphasises our inherent need for human companionship and experiences.