Humanity has arguably spent longer time staying indoors than being out under the blue for the first time in history. And so, the privateness of life has crept up in ways stranger than before. It lingers around, while we have simply nothing to do. Being born and brought up in a culture that is unreservedly extroverted doesn’t help; from architecture, familial living, to seeking triumph in numbers, clustering is a social grammar everybody speaks in the subcontinent. Crowds are the place where everybody finds themselves. Even those who would not describe themselves as outgoing cannot deny that the sudden disappearance of public is unsettling, the abrupt retreat of noise is deafening. The subcontinent on a good day is a clamorous place.
The way I see it (hear it rather), clatter is loudest about drumming up stereotypes. Indians shout out stereotypes like it is native tongue; Punjabis are a jolly bunch, Bengalis have embarrassing nicknames, Tamilians are nerds, Malayalis are Madrasis, all Gujaratis want is an American visa. By and large, Indians are poor but happy, eat curry, worship many gods, and will avoid a confrontation. Stereotypes can be true and false at the same time. But what a stereotype cannot endure is interiority. A stereotype is a flat surface which, when invested with privateness, surrenders to depth. Not one stereotype about Indians that I have heard I found remotely interesting but, for what its worth, there is something else, which is curiously common to us all - broadly speaking, on the whole, Indians do not keep a hobby.
Hobbies are of many kinds; knitting, singing, learning something new, doing something together, these are all perfectly legitimate pastimes. But the ones I find missing are dogged pursuits; collecting, making, tinkering, or doing something routinely, as a matter of personal commitment to oneself. An activity that brings joy on its own, one that thrives without exposure or pay for years on end. An activity so private to you that others need to earn their way into getting a glimpse of it, into what keeps you engaged and away. To have a serious hobby is to claim a private life, the kind in which you take pleasure in doing something for its own sake. Make a small world of your own, and spare it the burden of purpose. To have a serious hobby is its own kind of rebellious act, small but not an insignificant one. ‘What’s your hobby’ is a staple question in job interviews, but no one has ever answered it with any detail or passion; has it ever been asked out of genuine curiosity?
Rare as they are, I know a few serious hobbyists. There is an elderly couple who spent their entire lives working in a post office, and pursued a committed hobby of making puppets. They created hundreds of marionettes, hand-, finger-, shadow-, puppets of all make and kind, only to dump them in the attic at the end, not one was ever meant to be on display! There was a neighbour who looked after an antique shop, and built doll's houses in her spare time. She was an incessant carver, kept a knife that sliced and chiseled away at hand always. She built over 500 wooden houses, each no less beautiful than the other, and left them at strangers' doorsteps because she had run out space to keep them! But perhaps the most eccentric hobbyist was closer home. An uncle of mine had a secret love for train-models. He started small, scrapped countless versions early on, till he hit upon a way of scaling it up. He built a terrace shed faster than he built a home for his fledgling family underneath. The room above, in its final version, was a model spread over 100 square feet, with cork, foam, metal file, control circuitry, multiple tracks, trees, rocks, tunnels, bushes, roads, bridges, houses, diorama, and water flowing into the cleaning sheds, all soldered by an amateur hand, everything in miniature. He devoted to it countless hours, and at one time, all his savings!
Privateness of the kind that a serious hobby is, is almost entirely missing from the subcontinent. The exceptional few who have managed to nurture this purely private liberty are perhaps doing better than most at surviving these bleak times indoors. For the rest of us, I wonder if we are a people who never give any serious thought to who we are when we are not with others. I wonder what is it that we do when we find ourselves in our own company. What is it that we do if we do not keep a hobby?
(PC: Lucerne Museum, Personal Allbum)
