SMALL CIRCLES, BIG CHANGE

As 2025 draws to a close, one of the quietest yet most telling shifts in urban India has not been about technology, politics, or even work, but about how people are choosing to spend their time together.

- Anjali Kochhar

In a year marked by digital fatigue, emotional burnout, and a growing conversation around loneliness, many Indians have found comfort not in scale, but in smallness, not in virality, but in familiarity.

There's a particular hush that settles over a park when a dozen people open the same book. There's a different kind of hum that rises inside a neighbourhood studio where strangers rehearse a theatre monologue, or around a dining table where a group leans into the clack of mahjong tiles. These are small, ordinary moments — but they signal something quietly profound: people returning to each other in a world that has steadily pushed them apart.

Across Indian cities, micro-communities — from book clubs and running crews to mahjong circles, theatre pods, craft collectives and hobby groups — have emerged as one of 2025's most meaningful social trends.

"Small, self-organised communities are restoring something mass society lost: trust and belonging," says Vivek Singhal, Author of Dominion and Dharma: Reframing Capitalism. "When humans meet as equals to share stories, they rediscover a kind of connection that technology alone cannot provide."

Why small matters