Everyone is welcome at The Space
Poorva and Pranshu, the couple behind The Space, Chandigarh, a community focused on spirited conversations on literature, talk about finding room for thought in Chandigarh, the space (no pun intended) they are creating, and how the city influences them.
What do you do and why do you do it?
Poorva: I’m Poorva, and I am an Assistant Professor of English at GGDSD College, Chandigarh.
Pranshu: I’m a government lawyer, working as a Deputy District Attorney with the Haryana government.
Poorva: We established the space in December 2023 because we realised the city needed a community where people could actually sit and discuss things. There were a lot of book clubs, but there was no particular space dedicated to discussion and intellectual exchange.
So we thought, okay, since there’s no space, let’s establish the space. We discuss films, ideas, books, personalities, anything and everything. We’ve even discussed the concept of nothing, which ended up being one of our longest discussions.
It’s a non-profit community, and we’ve never monetised it. We meet every Sunday at a café.
It’s really just a couple of people sitting around a table and having an intellectual discussion over a cup of coffee.
When someone walks into the space for the first time, what do you hope they experience that they perhaps don’t get from the usual cultural spaces in Chandigarh?
Poorva: What sets the space apart is that it’s an open association. There is no barrier to entry, no registration, no cover charge. You’re free to just walk in. People of all ages are part of it. The one thing we’re particular about is that if we’re discussing a book or text, you should have read it.
Pranshu: The quality of discussion is also a big factor. We have a core team, so usually five or six people have read the text beforehand. When someone joins for the first time, they see the kind of discussion we’re having, and that creates a certain standard.
Poorva: There’s also a proper structure to how we choose what to discuss. People recommend books, we put them to a poll, and the core team filters them based on the writing, author, subject and whether the text is actually talkable and thought-provoking.
How is the space influenced by the city of Chandigarh?
Poorva: Chandigarh is essentially not a city of clubs or nightlife. It’s a city of cafés and communities. You have so many cafés that are welcoming of long tables, where people can sit and discuss. And there are more than 80 communities across the Chandigarh Tricity that people aren’t even aware of.
It’s also a city of readers, writers and authors. There is a genuinely interested audience for reading. I think that’s why the space could actually flourish. There was a need for it.
Pranshu: The essence of the space is really stemming from Chandigarh itself. It’s carrying forward the ethos of the city, of people coming in from different places. The Open Hand is a good symbol for that. It’s open to all, open to receiving and open to giving.
That is the ethos we try to imbibe in the space. If we can contribute towards that in our own little way, it’s a big blessing for us. And now we’re trying to push it beyond the bounds of the city. We’ve started one virtual meeting every month, with people joining from the States and Canada. So in a way, it has become an international community as well.
​Pranshu: It’s democratic too. Everyone gets a vote. We discuss contemporary books as much as classics, and while we’ve discussed several Booker awardees, that’s never the sole criterion. It’s always by consensus.
Poorva: We also think about what we want to explore next. After Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 and The Vegetarian, for example, we felt we’d done two feminist texts and needed to switch. So the question is “what is the next thought we wish to bring to the table?”
How has your relationship with writing and poetry evolved since you started this space?
Pranshu: It has changed completely. As working professionals, you don’t really get much time to read. But when you know you’re going to meet your friends at the end of the week, and you want to discuss the book, it pushes you to read a lot more than you otherwise would. It has also made me listen to much more diverse perspectives. Sometimes someone says something that completely changes how you look at a book, or even at life. You build perspective over time.
Poorva: For me, it’s been very different because I’ve been in academia for so many years. I would read a book and, believe you me, I would forget what was in it. I’d mostly take away the storyline. But when you sit at a table and discuss something like The Little Prince or Animal Farm line by line, the book really comes alive.
You’re seeing what you’ve read in theory actually happen in conversation. It opens up new worlds.
The learning you take away is no longer just the story or the summary. It gives you questions and sometimes answers some of your own life questions. And it has changed how I communicate too. People often ask, how do we improve our communication skills? It’s like swimming.
You talk better by talking more. Every Sunday, if you’re sitting at a table for three hours, talking, debating and exchanging ideas, the benefit of that adds up. For me, that has been life-changing.
Communities seem to be everywhere today, but sustaining one is much harder than starting one. What has helped The Space endure?
Poorva: I think the fact that both of us are married to each other, and that we already have established careers, gives the community a certain stability. A lot of communities are run by young people, and then they change cities, get jobs, or life simply gets in the way.
When the people at the core have other things relatively sorted, there is a little more stability in the structure. For us, we take it on with a sense of responsibility. We’re not doing it just for fun. At the same time, it’s our getaway from the house. It’s also very difficult to maintain adult friendships.
Through the space, we get to meet our friends every weekend, but meaningfully. You’re not just sitting around and talking. You’re coming with a topic in mind, so the interaction becomes a different kind of friendship.
What has been your favourite event so far?
Poorva: We’ve had a ball dance party, Gravity and Levity based on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, picnics, and game meetups. My favourite would be the games meetups.
We’ve done games around Greek and Roman mythology, so even though you’re coming to play, you still have to read and do your homework. I love games and puzzles, and we’ve also done blackout poetry. You’re still learning, but in a completely different way.
Pranshu: The ball was my favourite. Everyone wanted a Bridgerton-style, dance-themed party, so we hosted one with food, dancing, a choreographer and salsa. Everyone came dressed in formals, so it was almost like a black-tie evening.
How does the venue contribute to each meetup and its energy?
Poorva: We struggled with venues initially because most cafés ask you to leave after 2-3 hours, and there’s often a minimum billing issue when people are sitting around a table with just a coffee. Lately, we’ve been quite lucky.
Café Wellbeing in Sector 22 has been very open to us. They have a table reserved for community discussions and the book club with Cuppa Classics. Beige is also very welcoming of different communities, and the Sri Aurobindo Society has offered Aurobindo Bhavan (Hall in Sri Aurobindo School, Sector 27, Chandigarh) for discussions and meetups.
Pranshu: We don’t always meet indoors. In summer, we tend to use cafés, while in winter we meet outdoors. We’ve had discussions at Sukhna Lake, the Rose Garden and different parks around the city.
Poorva: That’s one of the best things about the space. It lets us actually use the city. We’ve even had a meeting at the underpass, and once sat on the grass at Shantikunj discussing T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The setting becomes part of the experience.
How do you feel about this growing culture of offline spaces?
Poorva: There’s this idea of the ‘third space’ that every city has, beyond your home and workplace. In Chandigarh, I think that idea is especially relevant. For us, the space is three hours where we’re completely off our screens and actually present. There’s no digital interference, and we really value that.
Pranshu: Offline meetings are much more interesting because you can see facial expressions and reactions, three people can talk at once, and sometimes the discussion gets really heated.
Poorva: I think it’s more important than ever. Everyone is getting a little tired of AI-generated summaries. People want to feel connected. We’ve had people who, when they moved cities, wrote to us about how much the space had meant to them. Some of them are introverted or, as I like to say, nerds, and finding like-minded people makes a real difference. I think we all want to find someone who matches our wavelength.
Pranshu: We’re present in both online and offline spaces, and our offline meetings always run much longer. When an online meeting ends, the discussion usually ends with it. Here, people continue talking after the meeting, become friends, hang out and pick up the conversation again.
The discussion doesn’t necessarily end when the meeting does. I think that’s the real importance of offline spaces.
