Hobbies

My hobbies are fighting a war for the largest share of my time. And blogging is losing out at the moment.

I always had a lot of hobbies. Collecting stamps took so much of my time during my childhood days that the word “hobby” was almost synonymous with stamp collecting. I would not have thought it possible at the time, but I don’t think I can tell where my stamp albums are now.

Other hobbies came and went. Some, like spirograph, caught on and stayed for a while. Some others, like matchbox-collecting, failed to make an impact. Some remained close to my heart, even if they were not getting the most attention all the time. Origami, coin-collecting and reading would fit this description.

After I joined my first job in 2005, I developed two new hobbies – blogging and photography. Slowly, as I gained expertise in the latter, it grew and threatened to push all my other hobbies out of the schedule. Digital photography demands a lot of time, especially if you own a DSLR and shoot RAW. I did not have time for much else except the occasional blog post. Even reading, once my first love, had to be cut down severely.

And then, last month, my school closed down for summer vacation and I started indulging myself in a very old hobby – painting. All of it isn’t painting actually: technically I use three kinds of media. I have used charcoal to draw people’s portraits and watercolor to paint landscapes and other things before, but the medium that I have fallen in love with recently is oil pastel. And I have been drawing almost one painting a day since then – some of them imitations of other people’s work, and some of them copies of my own photographs. I am also continuing working with watercolor and charcoal. Here are a few of my latest creations. All of them are done using oil pastels on paper.

My hobbies are fighting a war for the largest share of my time, and painting seems to be emerging the winner right now.