BY BEDRAJ TRIPATHY
AVP Marketing, Godrej Interio
I once met a philatelist who dived into dustbins at post offices to fish for discarded envelopes. It’s commonplace to find people who are able to pursue their hobbies because they have the money, but this 17- year -old had an unconventional approach. By routinely raiding the bins, he managed to collect over 13 million stamps. I said to myself, “Now that’s what one can call passion.”
We typically introduce ourselves to others by talking about our work and our families. This is not to say that career and family hold no importance, but we fail to look beyond the conventional in our lives. Nothing suffocates the spirit like restricting the mind with compulsions. To break free from the tedium of routine, we need to constantly reinvent ourselves. For this, it is essential to have a hobby or a passion. It helps us open our eyes to things that we miss otherwise. This personally helps me enrich my professional as well as my personal life.
My tryst with the offbeat started during my bachelor days. I attempted a chicken preparation by putting together some ingredients instinctively. The result surprised everyone, and most of all, me. The fact that I didn’t follow a standard recipe made it special; a dish that had never been made before!
Today, my wife and I socialize through cooking and we share a love for experimental cuisine. I think of a taste and a texture I want to achieve and then work towards attaining that in the dish I create. I am completely unrestrained in the kitchen, often mixing two conventionally immiscible flavours together, like lemongrass with Mexican beans and lemon pepper. Cooking for me is a hobby that helps me go off the beaten track.
Like cooking, I have a great love for photography. I had friends with sophisticated DSLR cameras, who would always shoot pictures on the auto mode for fear of ruining the image. I once challenged them to operate the camera manually. They were initially skeptical. Trudging to a place where the grass grew wild, we lay flat on our stomachs to shoot pictures of rice stalks. There was discomfort, but the pictures turned out to be beautiful. That triggered a change, and my friends never went back to auto mode again. Today, I can confidently say that they have become much better at their craft – that too in a manual mode.
In a profession like marketing where one has to constantly reinvent one’s thinking, my penchant for seeking the atypical always comes in handy. I recount an episode when we had to deal with the difficult task of showcasing Godrej Interio’s latest range of furniture at the Lakme Fashion Week. Ultimately, it as an unconventional solution that saved the day. Our team conceptualized an augmented reality experience where the models interacted with virtual furniture on the ramp. The crowd went wild and the topic trended on Twitter for a few hours. The reaction was completely organic and it filled us with a sense of pride and fulfillment.
The key to reinvention lies in changing our outlook towards everyday life and disregarding any criticism or judgment that may come our way; we should be willing to lose battles or even be seen as a fool. Having a hobby will infuse more creativity into our lives. Work will no longer be tedious. Failure is always likely, but passion can drive us to success like nothing else can.
My last few words here: “Pick up a hobby today!”
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