On Sunday, 01-Mar-2020, my wife did a round of spring cleaning in our room. One of the many items that we discarded were several files. These files contained hundreds of newspaper article cuttings, which I had cut from newspapers like "The Times of India" (ToI) and The Hindu. The rest of this blog post is me looking back at my forgotten hobby of collecting newspaper articles.
I collected these articles from 1986 to around 2007. I had organised these articles into various categories like:
My wife playfully calls me "Robot" because I am a creature of routine and follow it with irritating precision at times ! I suppose the seeds for this tendency were set first by my genes, i.e. it is hereditary to a large extent. I think that my natural tendency to be robotic was reinforced by my hobby !
Collecting newspaper articles requires a routine to be followed, a good amount of commitment and an equally good amount of dedication. The process I followed was as follows:
As I became busy during work, this hobby slowly became a process too long for me to continue. The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web was another factor. I found myself spending time online more and more in the 2000s. Somewhere around 2007, I abandoned my hobby.
How did I abandon my hobby ? Over the years, I continued to read, but most of the reading became online rather than newspaper articles. A reflection of the categories of newspaper articles could be seen in my browser bookmarks ! I had a folder for PCs, a folder for work related content, etc. ! Slowly, my interest in cutting and then filing newspaper articles dwindled. Around 2007, it completely died. Looking at the physical files in March 2020 unearthed by my wife, I find myself wondering : "Did I really do all of this ?!" In 2013, I took to Twitter. The information on my interests that I get via Twitter is almost addictive. I share hyperlinks discovered by Twitter on WhatsApp with groups who I feel share the common interests. For example, I share cricket related information with my college friends and a group of friends and colleagues who I know are interested in cricket. On the other hand, articles related to technology are shared with cousins and friends at work, etc. So I suppose that my old hobby of collection has transformed into a new hobby of sharing off beat articles and hyperlinks with (possibly !) interested people !
I find that my hobby of collecting newspaper articles has taught me some important lessons:
Does this mean that there was a deep purpose to my hobby?! Not quite: I started it simply because reading interested me. I have a habit of picking on one quote on Monday mornings when the working week begins. I began writing this blog post on 02-Mar-2020. So, for the working week beginning 09-Mar-2020, I selected this quote: ".... no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. ....", by conservationist Aldo Leopold. The source of the quote is on page 28 in http://images.library.wisc.edu/AldoLeopold/EFacs/ALWritings/ALRoundRiver/reference/aldoleopold.alroundriver.i0003.pdf. The chapter is worth reading to understand why hobbies are important.
I completely agree with the sentiments expressed in Aldo Leopold's quote ! A hobby should be something that one just likes to do, whatever it may be: singing, drawing, photography, collecting postage stamps or collecting newspaper articles ! If there are advantages derived from the hobby, they would be incidental. The primary driver for hobbies is the pleasure the process gives.
In my case, reading the articles initially followed by the process of cutting, pasting and filing was time consuming. At times, it felt like a drudgery but at the end of the day when the articles were pasted and filed, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction and achievement ! My advice to people reading this blog post would be to discover or rediscover one activity that gives one pleasure, irrespective of how it is going to help you. In my experience, it invariably will help, though one may not immediately see how !
I collected these articles from 1986 to around 2007. I had organised these articles into various categories like:
- Science, Engineering and Technology: From '86 itself, I have been fascinated by advances in science and technology. Future gazing also interests me.
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| The very first news article in my collection numbered as "1" shows how medicine would be in 2000. The article was written in 1986. Some of the predictions are prescient : telemedicine and advances in genetics are hot topics even now, in 2020 ! I stopped numbering of my articles after some time. |
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| The tender notice in the back of one of my earliest numbered articles shows the date of 26-May-1986. So, my collection started in early 1986 ! |
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| The human body and human health have fascinated me. In Hamlet's quote "What a piece of work is man!", I saw a sense of wonder. I also liked the lover of logic and symmetry that the fictional detective Hercule Poirot displayed. So this is also seen here. |
- Health and Medicine: I grandly named a file related to health as "What a piece of work is man!". The line is from William Shakespeare's play "Hamlet". It contains articles related to health and physiology.
- Culture and History: ToI made an uncommon word popular in 1988, when the newspaper celebrated its 150th anniversary: the word was "sesquicentennial", which is the adjective form of "150th" ! ToI published interesting articles to commemorate its sesquicentennial anniversary, some of which I have cut.
- Trivia: The annual Filmfare awards and Academy Awards (Oscars) form a part of this category.
- Serials: These are repeating columns or cartoons. "Animaloons" from the newspaper "The Hindu", cut in the '90s is an example. One of my favourites is the reporting of the Second World War from "The Hindu". The war started in 1939. To commemorate it's golden anniversary, "The Hindu" published its reports from 50 years ago, in 1989. The headlines stimulated my interest in history.
My wife playfully calls me "Robot" because I am a creature of routine and follow it with irritating precision at times ! I suppose the seeds for this tendency were set first by my genes, i.e. it is hereditary to a large extent. I think that my natural tendency to be robotic was reinforced by my hobby !
Collecting newspaper articles requires a routine to be followed, a good amount of commitment and an equally good amount of dedication. The process I followed was as follows:
- To begin with, I had to identify newspaper articles worth filing. When I read the newspaper, I would be thinking "Is this article a 'keeper' ?" If yes, the next step would be to mentally decide which category it would fall into. This was usually straight forward, but the categories of Trivia and Culture overlapped at times. In philosophical terms, the Sanskrit word "viveka" is used as a term to distinguish the permanent from the temporary. In a very, very small way, I feel that my reading and deciding which one to keep was also "viveka" (discernment or discrimination) in action !
- On Saturdays or Sundays, I would take an old shaving razor blade (I remember that in Mumbai this was the "Topaz" brand !) and cut the articles. This could be messy, since the dark newsprint could get on to my fingers at times.
- I took sheets of brown paper and cut them into long rectangular strips of the same size. This would be often a drudgery during the process. At the end of it, when I ended up with a stack of brown regularly sized strips, the result was well worth the effort.
- The articles had to be pasted on to the strips. Sometimes, it would be one article per strip if the article was big. Sometimes, there would be two or even three.
- If cutting was a messy task, pasting was even messier ! I remember using "Joker" gum paste in Mumbai in the '80s. In Bengaluru, I have used "Camel" gum. Whichever brand it was, after pasting ten or fifteen articles, my hands and fingers would have dried glue on them.
- Next, I folded the brown strips with the newspaper cuttings in half to punch holes for filing.
- Once the filing was done, the process was almost complete. I say "almost" because the final step was to wash and rub my hands to remove the newsprint and the glue !
As I became busy during work, this hobby slowly became a process too long for me to continue. The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web was another factor. I found myself spending time online more and more in the 2000s. Somewhere around 2007, I abandoned my hobby.
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| The Filmfare awards for 2007 are probably among the last articles that I cut. This is part of the "Trivia" category and physical file. The Academy awards for the year are also seen here. |
How did I abandon my hobby ? Over the years, I continued to read, but most of the reading became online rather than newspaper articles. A reflection of the categories of newspaper articles could be seen in my browser bookmarks ! I had a folder for PCs, a folder for work related content, etc. ! Slowly, my interest in cutting and then filing newspaper articles dwindled. Around 2007, it completely died. Looking at the physical files in March 2020 unearthed by my wife, I find myself wondering : "Did I really do all of this ?!" In 2013, I took to Twitter. The information on my interests that I get via Twitter is almost addictive. I share hyperlinks discovered by Twitter on WhatsApp with groups who I feel share the common interests. For example, I share cricket related information with my college friends and a group of friends and colleagues who I know are interested in cricket. On the other hand, articles related to technology are shared with cousins and friends at work, etc. So I suppose that my old hobby of collection has transformed into a new hobby of sharing off beat articles and hyperlinks with (possibly !) interested people !
I find that my hobby of collecting newspaper articles has taught me some important lessons:
- Curiosity: To begin with, in the '80s and '90s as a student (mostly !), I read the newspaper with a voracious appetite to see which articles I could cut at the end of the week. Sadly, the current news did not interest me. The big headlines in page 1 are missing in my collection. On the other hand, the less popular articles and news reports on advances in medicine and technology did interest me. My curiosity towards technology and medicine was stimulated by my hobby.
- Routine: As my wife says, this is a double edged sword. On one hand, a routine can trap a person into repetitive tasks that add no value. On the other hand, following a routine enables the setting up of a means that would enable a person to achieve his/ her goals.
- Interest: Due to the newspaper articles, I have become interested in topics that I would not have been that interested earlier. I was not interested in spirituality, since I was too young for such "heavy" topics. I started reading "The Speaking Tree" in ToI, a column on spiritual topics. I discovered that I quite liked some insights that it offered. I started reading it on a regular basis. There are other interests that have been stimulated also by my hobby, like an interest in history and technology. Even in this age of forwards in social media apps like WhatsApp, one has to filter between the blatantly false and the possibly real. I am unsure if I am always successful, but I have developed a healthy (some may say "unhealthy" !) skepticism of forwarded videos and text messages. My blog post https://fewidlethoughts.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-review-of-name-of-rose-by-umberto-eco.html reiterates the importance of being skeptical in the age of social media and forwarded messages. I have disabled automatic video downloads in WhatsApp currently !
Does this mean that there was a deep purpose to my hobby?! Not quite: I started it simply because reading interested me. I have a habit of picking on one quote on Monday mornings when the working week begins. I began writing this blog post on 02-Mar-2020. So, for the working week beginning 09-Mar-2020, I selected this quote: ".... no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. ....", by conservationist Aldo Leopold. The source of the quote is on page 28 in http://images.library.wisc.edu/AldoLeopold/EFacs/ALWritings/ALRoundRiver/reference/aldoleopold.alroundriver.i0003.pdf. The chapter is worth reading to understand why hobbies are important.
I completely agree with the sentiments expressed in Aldo Leopold's quote ! A hobby should be something that one just likes to do, whatever it may be: singing, drawing, photography, collecting postage stamps or collecting newspaper articles ! If there are advantages derived from the hobby, they would be incidental. The primary driver for hobbies is the pleasure the process gives.
In my case, reading the articles initially followed by the process of cutting, pasting and filing was time consuming. At times, it felt like a drudgery but at the end of the day when the articles were pasted and filed, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction and achievement ! My advice to people reading this blog post would be to discover or rediscover one activity that gives one pleasure, irrespective of how it is going to help you. In my experience, it invariably will help, though one may not immediately see how !
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