Hobbies of different kind

‘A hobby is a regular activity done for pleasure - typically during leisure - e.g., collecting themed items and objects, engaging in creative and artistic pursuits, playing sports.’ Wikipedia defines hobby in this manner. Collection has been my favorite pastime since childhood. The first of things which I really collected and remember vividly were bus tickets. I used to ask everybody around me, who travelled in bus to hand over their tickets to me. And when people asked me what I would do with them, I used to proudly say that I would become a bus conductor with all these tickets. When I think of it now, I find it very funny. There were tickets of different colors and I found the ticket set with the conductors very fascinating. What all one fancies during childhood!!

Next in line, which I started collecting was greeting cards. I have around 500 greeting cards even today, in my parents’ house. I got many of them for birthday, festivals and so on. My aunt, who shifted to the US, gave me a whole set of greeting cards, unused and that added to my collection. I find greeting cards very personal and full of emotions. They talk to you through visuals and words and win your hearts and bring smile on your face. I have greeting cards of all shapes and sizes and colors and when I go through them now, each one brings me a memory each and I revisit the past and meet the people who gifted me those cards.

Soft toys are my weakness, even now. I have a collection of different animals, dolls, teddy bears in my Bangalore house. Now, when I am in Germany, I bring soft toys for my toddler son and am highly charged up seeing him play with them. Here, I have a collection of sheep, tortoise, dog and a stuffed doll. I will carry all of them back to India whenever I return. We have even named the soft toys here. The dog is Tipu, stuffed doll is guddu, sheep is called ba and the tortoise is called simba. I feel very happy when I see them all sitting in the window looking outside. They are like family members to us!

I collected stones of different colors and sizes, sea shells, conches for some time. I used to pick them up when I visited a beach or a forest or a village. But I discarded them somewhere, reasons unknown. Then pens caught my attention. I had collected around 100 types of different pens. They came in different shapes and sizes and colors. But many of them dried up and I had to throw them or give away to someone who could make a good use of them. Then Stabilo pens from Germany became my priced possessions. I bought them for gifting to my close friends and I also kept a set of 26 pens for myself and tried to make personal notes in diary or while working at home or in office using different color combinations. The pens are of excellent quality and they haven’t yet dried up since 2008-2009 when I was gifted by my hubby. My dad loves them too. Every time, I make a trip home, he requests for 1 set of pens without fail and he loves gifting them to his friends and colleagues and relatives. The people who have got these pens from us also have positive words for the gift and they say it is a very useful gift. 

Off late, the thing that has caught my fancy, are magnets. I am interested in the ones, which we can put on refrigerators and which have the name of the city and a prominent monument of that city embossed on it. I started the collection from 2010, when I had been to Strasbourg. Then, there was nothing stopping me. I have magnets of Stuttgart, Brussels’, Cologne, Madrid, Toledo. Whenever I visit the places in and around Germany, I will collect them and take them back to display on the fridge in my house. I also ask my friends to get magnets for me, when they visit the places, which I might not be able to visit. I think it will make a cool collection very soon. I can see most of the European cities by just having a glance and I can revisit the memories I made in each of the cities that I visited.

I know people who love collecting postal stamps, coins of different currencies, diaries, bags, purses, footwear, belts, balls, caps, and accessories of different kinds. There may be many others who collect unusual stuff. Do let me know in case you are one of them or come across such person.

How good or bad is this collection of different things? Is it a hoarding of some kind? Is it an effort to cling on to the past by keeping the things in one’s possession unused? But I do not really mind as far as I am happy with it and it is not creating any nuisance to the other person!

What say?