What Hobbies Were For

At 18 they were fun. At 22 they were a choice. At 24 they were survival.

At RKMRC Narendrapur the table tennis board was right beside our room in first year. I would hear the sound of the ball and just go. No plan, no goal. I learned to play because the sound pulled me in.

I played cards till 4am with the same people. I was social there in a way that felt effortless, the kind of social that doesn’t require any convincing. The environment made it easy, and I didn’t think much about it.

Then IIT Madras happened and something shifted.

In MSc I wanted to learn harmonica. Not guitar. Everyone was learning guitar. I didn’t want to follow that. I had seen people play harmonica in movies, how smoothly the sound came out, how small the instrument was, how completely personal it seemed. So, I bought one and figured it out alone. Titanic first, then Bella Ciao, then the Game of Thrones theme. Nobody taught me. Nobody suggested it. It was entirely mine.

I left the harmonica somewhere in IISER Bhopal. I’m not sure exactly where. I’ll buy another one someday, a better one. What I’m hoping is that four years of not playing hasn’t taken everything away. I know the sargam. I just hope the hands still remember.

At IISER I picked up photography.

I bought a Canon M50 when someone told me not to. The lineup is dead, they said, Canon has abandoned it. Not everyone can suddenly invest three lakhs in a hobby. I did my research, bought an adapter, a speed booster, cheap lenses. Figured it out the same way I figured out the harmonica. Alone, slowly, on my own terms.

For 5.5 years that camera went everywhere with me. Waterdrops. Birds. Architecture. Whatever caught my eye. People who had decided I was arrogant, anti-social, difficult. Those same people asked me to photograph them. I did. That was never the point.

The point was that when I was out with a camera nobody came to lecture me. Nothing I captured could be dismissed or graded or compared. It was the one place in those six years where I answered to nobody.

A few weeks ago, I sold the entire M50 kit and moved to the R7. Five and a half years with one camera is a long time. Long enough that it stops being just a camera.

I think about what hobbies have meant at different points in my life. At RKMRC they were just fun, something you did because the sound of a ball pulled you toward a room. At IIT Madras they were a choice, something you picked deliberately, against the trend, because you wanted it. At IISER they were something else entirely. Survival, maybe. The proof that there was a version of you that existed outside, outside the labels people had given you.

Nobody teaches you that hobbies can do that. You figure it out the same way you figure out everything else that actually matters.

Alone. Slowly. On your own terms.

Originally published at https://shinyakogami.substack.com.