Hobby means a favourite pursuit or pastime. It is just a side interest in which a man takes great pleasure. A professor of English, for example, may take great interest in collecting postage and revenue stamps, Philately is his hobby. A carpenter may be fond of gardening or plant-collecting.
Gardening is his hobby. Frederick the Great, it is said, composed poems when engaged in bloody battles. Poetry was his hobby. Thus the range of hobby is wide. It depends upon one’s fancy or inclination.
Examples of other kinds of hobbies may be multiplied and infinite. but the following few may serve as typical instances of hobbies- keeping pets like dogs, cats, mice, buying old manuscripts: drawing cartoons; collecting pictures; preserving specimens of butterflies; collecting empty cigarette boxes; playing on piano, violin, sitar, etc; making a toy aeroplane, a telephone etc. making and flying of kites, so on and so forth.
One cannot explain or justify a hobby. It is one’s inclination, and inclinations are unreasonable things. Some may develop hobbies which may be entirely fanciful. Some may develop hobbies which may be very useful. In any case, hobbies yield pleasure and some hobbies yield profit, too.
One may like to collect photographs of film actresses and decorate his study room, another may like to build for himself and armchair, or cultivate a vegetable garden of brinjals and bananas.
It is said of a Chicago Professor of Philosophy that his major hobby was to measure the noses of persons he met in life (both men and women), and his minor hobby was to walk on hands (rather than legs) on Sundays.
In educated and developed communities hobbies are more widespread. It was Akbar’s hobby to assemble talents and geniuses in his court and to learn from them what each had to contribute.
Are hobbies of any use, besides the use of mere satisfaction of a whim? It depends on the type of hobby that one cultivates. If a man’s hobby were to count and record the number of persons possessing six fingers (instead of file) or if it was a man’s hobby to find out the number of stars in the sky, well they might both end in a pleasant satisfaction of a personal wish and no more: but, if on the other hand, a man were to cultivate the hobby of playing on a piano or lay g out a fin vegetable garden, who would deny in that Profit?
Extent and variety of hobbies are a test of nations. It is also a mark of individual curiosity. It is a sign of cheerfulness, vivacity and readiness to live life.
Nobody would think that a dull person would cultivate a hobby. Nor
Now, supposing if a man likes to collect animals for a private Zoo, should we call him an animal-minded man or should we call him an animal himself? Well, in both cases we are right and we are wrong. Right because all men are animals, and a man’s love of animals is a natural born love, nothing wrong or reproachable.
The British race, decidedly one of the topmost races of the world, is the world’s greatest lovers of cats and horses. They are also the world’s pioneers founding zoological gardens. What should we then conclude? Are the British brutish or beastly? Are they animals themselves?
Ah, they are, but one of the fines, to be sure. In short, a hobbyless person is a comparatively dull fellow. His sphere is narrow his Mind is cramped by the notion of immediate gain and loss he perhaps lacks Imagination and mental elasticity.
