The tale of a bat wielding bug...

Me: *Annoyingly sweetly* Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself.
BT1: *Annoyingly annoying* Like what?
Me: *Most helpfully* Like what you do? What you like to do when you get some free time?
BT1: *Bored* I am in FYJC. Ruia. Commerce.
Me: *With that ‘what joy’ tone* Nice nice. So how is it to be in college?
BT1: *Bored* Is okay.
Me: *Persistent tone* What is the best part about your college?
BT1: *Bored* It is cool.
Me: *Upbeat tone* How very nice. So what all do you apart from going to college?
BT1: *Bored* Nothing.
Me: *Persistent tone* Errr, surely you have hobbies? What are your hobbies?
BT1: *After longest pause* I like to watch TV. You know, Fear Factor.
Me: *Oh-I-totally-understand tone* Right right, how nice. What about other hobbies?
BT1: *Face brightening* I like to chat.
Me: Errr, right. Internet?
BT1: Na, with my girl.
Me: *In despair* Right, right.

Me: *Annoyingly sweetly* Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself.
BT2: I am in SYJC. Computers. I want to do Engineering.
Me: *Wow-you-are-so-smart voice* Oh great. That must be tough!
BT2: *D-uh* Uh-Huh!
Me: So why engineering?
BT2: *D-uh* No Idea.
Me: Right! So tell me apart from going to college, you must be having hobbies no?
BT2: *D-uh* Nope. I don’t have time. I go for tuitions.
Me: *most helpfully* What about weekends? Do you play cricket?
BT2: Play?? *Incredulous-You-Moron Expression* I need to go for “extra” tuitions during weekends!
Me: *in despair* Oh dear!

May I have the pleasure of introducing to you - BT1 and BT2 (BT aka Bored Teenager). BT’s can be found in your neighborhood, wearing American University or European Football Club/ league T-shirts, looking rather angry, mostly undernourished, carrying books filled with incomprehensible questions on Quantum physics and seen hopping from one tuition class to another (usually in pursuit of Mathematical Genius).

Occasionally cheer (!) is added to their lives when “evil” marketers trap them and subject them to the world’s most inane questions in hope of selling more toothpaste (what else?) You see every person walking on the road is a library of “insights” and once I get under their skin/ into their shoes I might have the next big idea! Honest. That is the business-model that we operate with. We promise our clients on how we can develop this kind of “cosmic connect” with the consumers.

Establishing a connect with a random person walking on the road as you can imagine is hardly the most easy thing to do. Hell this connect business it is tough as it is! But one tries very hard to do that (in the interest of keeping those kitchen fires burning). And to do that, we catch hold of these people and usually ask:
a. A comprehensive bunch of questions, that can be used as missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to construct the big picture
b. The same question over and over again, in different ways (usually up to the point when the person being questioned doesn’t slap you)

Now if your job is all about, ‘asking questions’ then you need to take care right? When I started working, my then supervisor gave me the simplest piece of advice and suggested that I never ask people questions that “I” cannot/ will not answer. It is a good benchmark to keep in mind. And there is a very thin line that separates healthy curiosity from being inquisitively obtrusive.

Over the years of working I have concluded that “I” cannot answer many of the questions that I ask my consumer. Heh! I mean I have no clue:
… Why I buy X brand of shampoo
… What is the Freudian connection between the colours of the packaging of the ready-to-eat food and the shared moment of intimacy with my partner? (Okay, so I don’t have a partner… but it is a tough question anyway!)
… What animal my toothbrush will morph into, should I personify the qualities to it.
… If the colour of the model’s sari in the toilet cleaner ad adhere to what I believe about the brand (!)
… Why should Dhoni be advertising a Sandal soap brand?

Thankfully I am on the side that asks all these questions!

The most difficult people to interview are – men and teenagers. And the grief increases manifold when your audience is the 17-year-old boy. Now I empathize with their trauma of being subjected to such inane questions (and it can bore any person in the world). Yet, these are people who like to “demonstrate” their boredom. Gah! Thank god for the cultivated thick skin, which makes you go ahead and ask those questions anyway.

Anyway, let me get to the “point” of this post. Of course, I do have a point most of the times, except that it is usually never a point, but a three dimensional geometrical thing! Honest.

So before we get to asking consumers about fabric wash preferences and the number of times they need to rinse their mouth with different brands of toothpaste we need to “warm” them up. And spare me any innuendoes will you! Warming up consumers is usually the regular ice-breaking thing. You basically give the person a fair OTT (Opportunity to Talk) by asking questions that are usually simple to answer/ or fun to answer. And so you ask women about their mother’s-in-law/ husbands/ aspirations for children etc. Rather easy. You modify the questions basis the life-stage/ gender of the people you are meeting.

However one has realized – new questions need to be invented after all. The old questions simply don’t seem to work. I have got the sense over the last couple of years, that asking anyone, the classic (and I daresay the mother of all warm up questions): “Okay, tell me about your hobbies?” Just doesn’t work. Nope. You will usually get any of the following:
1. Errr, Errrm, Ummm, Hmmm and their sisters (The Buying Time Syndrome)
2. Who has the time for hobbies (The Let Me Be in Denial Syndrome)
3. How much time will it take? (The Kill her with Aggression Syndrome)
4. Watching TV (Right!)

Welcome to the New India – the hobbies-are-what-my-mom-had generation.

Okay before you jump at me and show me all that empirical evidence of the various “hobby” courses that are blossoming in every nook and corner of all of our neighbourhoods (this so that our children morph into multifaceted talented individuals and what not), stop! These are not really hobbies. The child is thrust into it (with very little say in it). It is usually another one of those “classes” that he/she must attend and it becomes as painful as going for Sanskrit tuitions.

Hobbies are meant to be fun no? It is something that you do because you want to (even at the risk of getting disapproval from others). It is something that you would want to spend a languid Saturday afternoon with. It is something that you want to talk about with your friends. It is something that you want to show to others (if it can be shown) and it usually stays with you for a longish period of your life…

Like the dictionary definition says, ‘An activity or interest pursued outside one's regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure.’

The key here is the pleasure. The inexplicable joy that the right brain perceives that the left-brain can never really articulate.

I am your regular 80’s child, having spent some of the most impressionable years of my life in this period. Forget all the political turmoil of the decade (including the Sikh riots, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Thatcherism, Reganism, Russia, Iran-Iraq war), it was the decade when we won the World Cup, when Aamir Khan made his debut, when ET smashed box office records, when Batman, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Friday the 13th etc became cult movies, when John Lennon was shot dead, when designer stubbly dudes became a fashion statement, etc.

In spite of / because of / no connection to all of these macro factors – this was a good period to grow up in - enough amount of free time to pursue hobbies and not enough of technological advancement that could come in way of such hobbies.

So if my interest was, “Collecting Stamps” it was possible to do that because people who lived across the globe would indeed send you snail-mails. So collecting stamps [the process of extracting the stamps was itself a laboured task, I remember my dad would ask me to soak the envelope (after removing the letter naturally) and slowly pealing of the stamp. The trick was to soak the envelope for the just-right amount of time], collecting coins [more tougher as people needed to go to someplace and come back for you get coins… but I knew this boy who used to have many coins by virtue of having a large number of relatives in the Middle East. So he used to trade his coins for Indian currency, and we followed our own exchange rate depending on the size of the coins. So if he had a coin that had a diameter similar to the Indian 50 Paise, I would get two such coins for a rupee! Heh! I think, I got the better deal], collecting something, anything were all what broadly fell under the category of hobbies.

But now all of that seems to have gone out. Those happy days of seeking immensely simple pleasures…

Not to say that people don’t have interests. They do. But the way I understand Hobbies - that almost obsessive streak that it demands, is perhaps missing. Someone asked me recently isn’t reading a hobby? Or listening to music? Or even Blogging? I am not too sure. Somehow I associate some amount of – collection and creation with a hobby. So may be collecting every live recording of the Beatles might still be a hobby (though, it still does sound a bit strange to call that a hobby). Blogging is closer to a hobby (you are usually not paid to do it and it is fun as well). Yet it is not something I can keep in a cupboard and take it out on a day when I am feeling low, I can’t hold it in my hands, and it won’t age and fade away… It looks the same every single day. If at all with technology, it can only get better…

So I am a hobby-less person too. I mean, I wouldn’t know how to answer that if someone asked me that question. And I would be most embarrassed (apologetic even) to tell someone – reading and music are my hobbies. Oh well!

However, there is one place where hobbies still exist. And how!

I have been doing some content analysis of matrimonial websites profile adverts as a matter of academic interest. My quest for WMD (Web Made Dulha) has met with mostly comic results, which you don’t even want to know. But since I was helping an aunt put up a matrimonial profile for her son (aka Psycho Cousin No. 15) I did check out a few of those sites. Yes, the irony of the situation is not lost on me.

Basically I wanted to check, what it is like “out-there” now and come up with a profile for my cousin that will beat all the other boys (after all, blood is thicker than water). I noticed so many things, which deserves a post in itself actually, but I will spare that ordeal for self and others. But quick observation:

... That all boys with profile pictures broadly fall under two categories – Nikhil Chinappa look-alikes or Sonu Nigam look-alikes. This is a slightly worrying trend. Sonu Nigam is a no-brainer really (unless your mom is checking out the site for you… moms like Sonu Nigam, a legacy of the TVS Sa Re Ga Ma days). But Nikhil Chinappa is slightly scary. Okay, so Designer Stubbly dude is all nice, but you can’t marry boys who wear more rings than you and has more piercing than you, right? Or can you?

... That nobody actually asks for that tall, fair, slim, beautiful wife (unless the advert is being posted by a parent). Subtlety is totally in. You must read them to understand what I mean

... There has to be a mention of Culture and Values. Especially if they are in the wicked West themselves, they are reassuring you that none of that have-been-culturally-uprooted angst has affected their lives. Or may be they are reassuring themselves!

... That girls as young as 22, have their profiles. Sigh. Now how does one compete with that?!

Anyway, I can go on. But let me stop. The most common trait of these profiles is that all of them are very multi-faceted and have hobbies to boot! Yes, Hobbies. Not one, not two… usually half a dozen at least! Impressive eh?

What is even more impressive are what constitutes as hobbies – Bungee jumping, Para Sailing, White water rafting, Deep-sea diving, kickboxing! Errr? O-kay. Nice. The new adventure seeking generation, eh?! :)

But really, what I did once (as part of 100 things to do before I die) is surely not a hobby, is it? Else how does one do stuff like deep-sea diving in the vicinity of Bangalore is something I would like to know?

If you thought that was bad, take this – People, Minds, Cultures, Rains, Boat-rides and so on. Now you may like all of these. You may get an emotional high out of them. But how are they hobbies. And how come the people I need to interview, never ever say such things? Sigh.

However the important thing is that I have written out the Profile for Psycho Cousin 15 and have made him sound like a bit of a cross between – Cary Grant and Srinivasan Ramnaujam. Okay, so whatever chance he might have had of finding a bride is ruined eh?

I still remember Smugbug (Age 8) and Psycho Cousin 15 (Age 11) have this conversation:
SB: I want to bat now.
PC15: Girls don’t bat.
SB: What do you mean? I will not field at the boundary. The ball never comes there.
PC15: Listen, girls don’t play cricket okay?
SB: Well says who.
PC15: I do.
SB: Well in that case return my bat.
PC15: No way. That is mine. Your name is written, what?
SB: It actually is. *Pointing to neat printing of SMUGBUG at the bottom*
PC15: *Hysterical laughter and pointed the same gleefully to all the boys he was playing with... who all proceeded to laugh loudly* Girls are so silly.
SB stormed out of scene with bat in hand.

SB was never let to forget the story. Every time she came for vacation, she was the girl with a cricket bat that had her name on it. *Snigger Snigger* Boys always made fun of poor child. All boys in neighbourhood always sniggered behind her back and she was christened not so creatively - The Batty Girl. Oh well.

So the profile has been created, with twenty-three hobbies no less! Time has come for some Poetic Justice. Hah!