Pages of Joy began with books. It grew into everything books make possible.

Vrishank Sai Anand was around four or five years old when he noticed something that adults had stopped noticing: some children had shelves of books at home, and other children had none at all. Not fewer. None.

The response was the one a four-year-old would have. He gathered the books he had outgrown and looked for children who wanted them. Then he asked neighbours, cousins and family friends for theirs. Then people started bringing books to the door.

There was no plan, no organisation and no theory of change. There was a box of books and an obvious mismatch between who had them and who did not.

Each stage of Pages of Joy came from hitting the limits of the stage before it.

Collection ran into distribution. Gathering books is easy; getting the right book to the right child is not. That meant learning about reading levels, languages and what a specific community actually needed.

Distribution ran into permanence. Cartons delivered to a school with nowhere to put them end up in a cupboard. So the work moved to libraries: shelves, a catalogue, a named local host.

Libraries ran into engagement. A shelf is an invitation, not an experience. Storytelling sessions, reading circles and English-learning sessions followed, because plenty of children can decode a page and still believe reading is a chore.

Engagement ran into imagination. Every session ends the same way — a child asks what happens after the last page, and then answers it themselves. That instinct is where futures literacy came from.

Literacy allows a young person to understand the world as it is. Futures literacy allows them to imagine what it could become — and to recognise their own part in changing it.

The long-term aim is not a larger book-donation campaign. It is reading infrastructure that persists, programmes that turn access into engagement, and young people who have practised imagining futures rather than waiting for one — carried by local chapters that keep growing.