New workshops were always a happy time for me. A time for meeting new people or even if it were just the old people I knew, it was a change of place that made me happy about having the workshops. I was in a similar state of mind when the talks of outbound learning program began. Not-so-acquainted people plus the promise of a really fresh and close-to-nature surroundings, made the prospect of attending the workshop really enticing. The last few days of work before outbound learning, I was literally dragging myself to office and pushing reluctantly to work hard. And then the journey commenced and after a lot of hustle and bustle for nearly 28 hours, I finally reached Pegasus – Bangalore.
After meeting the new people and not-so-new people and having a sumptuous lunch, I sat down in what appeared to be more a house veranda than a class room with a really heavy head. If anyone just pushed me with a little finger I would have fallen asleep. I could vaguely comprehend the host asking questions about how we felt the campus was etc. And then, he uttered the ghastly sentence which jerked me from my blissful state to one of panic. Yes, he had asked the dreaded sentence – he asked us to introduce ourselves and give a hobby. HOBBY! What does he care even if I can become invisible for a hobby! Why do people feel the necessity for asking such questions? I felt like a mouse which was doing all it can to avoid the trap but heading towards the trap, all the same. My mind was as usual groping around desperately for what my hobbies were and not finding answers. I was just hopelessly waiting for my turn to come. Then it was the usual scheme of events. It was my turn to speak and I said, “I like watching movies and listening to music, especially film music”
First instinct is to ask what is so wrong with having them as a hobby. But watching movies and listening to music were not my hobbies. To put it in comprehensible terms, watching movies or listening to music is like having tea in the morning and talking to my parents once in 2 days. It is what I do to keep my day/week going. It is a habit. Not a hobby. Now don’t brandish a dictionary at me and ask me to read the meaning of the word hobby. That is a wasteful activity. I know that it means anything that occupies your time after what is supposedly your occupation. But think about it. Do you really call eating, sleeping etc as your hobbies?
Listening to music or watching movies is like that. I don’t get any mental revelations on seeing movies or listening to music. What my mind is really occupied with when I am listening to music or watching movies is what needs to be looked into carefully. So the racking of brains started. 3 days of the trip I decided to keep racking my brains to understand what I do when I listen to music. After 1 hour of total mental combat, I resorted to listening to music for resolving the headache. (Typical!)
The song Katrukullai from the movie Sarvam started playing and my mind purred in contentment. I really love the sound effect that came through this song. It was like drops of rain falling, singing and making music with the wind. My mind was filled with a beautiful picture of a lush green forest through which sunlight came in and gave a beautiful glow to anything that was light green. The sunlight was so tender and warm that it totally made one forget that sky was actually laden with grey clouds waiting to burst into rain. Even so, the rain that fell was not an outburst. Our clouds there knew well how to relieve themselves gently. It was a pleasant downpour where each drop had the leisure of floating to their heart’s content in the air and dance their way into the ground. The mischievous wind meandered through these droplets, romancing with each one of them; dancing with one, lifting another drop to a height and then dropping it suddenly, making 5 drops of another drop. This game kept playing at various degrees and then…. BANG! Groan… I do this with every song I listen to. I get transported to a different world, stay there, watch the beauty, feel the beauty and get lost in that world. And slowly, 5 minutes by 5 minutes, song by song, my time is gone. So at the end of 22 years, being a hopeless romantic, imagining worlds and romance in unseen ways, I had lost viable options for a useful hobby. I wish the situation was not so hopeless. I thought things must change from now. I must do something useful. Inside me, I knew that nothing was going to happen. It was totally unstoppable. My heart was never going to listen. It wanted to be transported to different worlds. Probably going to these places was what I really wanted. I just looked down at myself. Definitely not, I thought to myself. I hate journeys. I wanted to be directly transported there. Like disapparating in Harry Potter.
Basically it was my fetish for grandeur achievements in the field of science and reasoning that made me feel being a mere imaginer and a romantic is not so “great”. All said and done it was something pleasurable to me alone and did not give anyone else any happiness in anyway. Seriously, what do you care if I went to the next galaxy in my mind and came back here? But of course you would care if I could paint that picture I saw in my mind and show it to you. Just like the art director of Sarvam managed to show in his video. (Leave Arya and Trisha, I am talking about all the green in the song) Having a half baked occupation of time is of no use to anyone. It is dangerous as well. Why? Well by listening to songs and watching movies I am opening all the channels to my heart and sending nothing out as my expression. Lot of images, words, voices everything that stimulate me settle with no place to send it out. And a weird combination of events may unleash all the experiences and may culminate in me taking the wrong decision and choosing the wrong people to bestow my love upon.
That being the magnitude of the problem, I still stand by what I began the blog post with. I am in dire need of an activity (called a hobby) that will let me express and share all the beauty that I witness and I am sure to explore all possible opportunities.
5 comments:
First of all, really nice post. Without a hobby, life ll be really boring. Serious hobbies (decent attempt at oxymoron?) are must to spice up a bland life. On the side note, u really know to enjoy good music!! Try listening to rainymood.com!!
Thinking of my hobby list,it starts with pasting cars n bike newspaper cuttings(which got destroyed while shifting home :( ),numismatics and philately in school days(which was conveniently dropped during 9th std). However i never stopped playing cricket and football. It is better for the entire world to stop myself to listening good music :D Latest additions-book-reading and cooking.
Ivlo hobbies ah? :) I am thinking of starting arbit scribbling on a sketch book :)
Only few people know to express how they feel while enjoying music, well its my addiction rather than hobby or habit, you have done it SO beautifully. :) I can imagine how it must have been for you when you were in that RIO period. I was surprised to see the romance typically explained in the nature's context(remembering last week's rain and the street dance around 3 am for the song "adada mazhada" from paiyya walking back from office :D). The mood it transforms you to, still remains inexpressible by me and kudos to you for you had done that. :)
Very nice!
Might I suggest, writing?
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