Each One, Hobby One

Yesterday, I visited IIT Delhi to attend Literati Fest. This Literary Festival of IIT Delhi, as it’s FB page says, is a unique platform to display your literary mettle. It indeed was true, it was a great platform to explore the literary zest in you. There were so many activities/ performances going on at various places on the campus, some performed by the professional artists and other by the students pursuing their passion- passion for music, for poetry, for dance, for instruments, rather I would say “passion for life”.

Generally, when we go for such beautiful events/performances, the first and the only feeling is that of “pleasure”. However, lately, I’m getting this another feeling, feeling of “realization”, the realization of being so small if compared to these people having guts and finding time to pursue their passion.

I was there for 5 hours and witnessed the following kind of talents:

a. Solo stage performance for 60 minutes
b. Singing rockstars
c. Dancing (free-style as well as western forms)
d. Producing vocal beats sounds through their mouth (better than instruments, trust me on that!)
e. Hindi poetry
f. Urdu poetry
g. People working on crowd-funded projects in Fusion of poetry and music
h. Instrument players and the list goes on!!

IIT is considered to be amongst a few engineering colleges having a very tough curriculum (assignments, minors, majors, internships etc.). This totally amazed me that how the people part of such tough curriculum could find time not only to perform, but to plan, organize and manage such events and standing up to the excellence bar expected out of them.

Seeing all this made me ponder, where we are going wrong in our CA curriculum. We are working too hard, going to coachings, followed by long hours in the office (meeting the client’s expectations, fighting with deadlines etc.) and again reaching back and studying for exams. What’s the ultimate result we expect out of all this hard work we are putting in? It is restricted to clearing CA in first attempt (rank being an icing on the cake) and be a good working professional. But the important question here is, “Is that all which matters?”. My professional and personal experience force me to answer this in negative.

There are so many great professionals present out there, how do we expect to differentiate ourselves from them? By working harder? I don’t think so, it will take ages. I feel it is that unique talent within each of us (a hobby/ interest/ passion) which we are best at that can actually make us stand out of the crowd. Pictorial representation, which I generally use to make my point, for this situation goes like this:

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

As we can see, having an extra interest/ hobby already puts us in that special place (marked by color "black" in picture 3) and makes us real happy.

Also, if I talk about the industry expectations from their hires, they are rapidly moving beyond the grades, attempts and are looking forward to these skills in the candidates as it showcases the candidates’ creativity and zeal to unleash or experiment with new and creative ideas. If I share my personal experiences, when I was being interviewed for a startup (an idea very close to my heart), I was really surprised to see that 80% of the discussion time was given to the extra-curricular, my interests other than studies (how I spend my free time) and leadership skills I have portrayed and the like.

Also, I was visiting places in India with some random strangers. The trip started with an introduction of each one of us. We were all like, “I’m this, I’m that, blah, blah blah..). The interesting thing here is that after a month of the trip, we hardly remember qualifications, company, designation etc, of the trip mates. What we actually remember is their true talents, one was an awesome singer, the other one was a good mountaineer, one had a really good sense of humour, one could draw sketches/ caricatures in a matter of minutes etc. The people without such talents are soon forgotten and become part of the crowd.

On a lighter note, I was read this beautiful line somewhere a few days back:

“In metro today, I found someone reading my favourite book, it was like the book recommending that person to me”

This happens that we feel more connected to the person sharing the similar interest as ours. So, having that hobby will act as a catalyst in filtering “the right match” for you (pretty good incentive, huh?!  

So, as title of this article says, “Each One, Hobby One”. Let’s take a pledge today to have/develop at least one hobby (maximum, no bar) to pursue.

As a start, I’m joining gym from today, the one thing I had been procrastinating since long.

The author can also be reached at guptanyan93@gmail.com