Have you a hobby? I admit I don't have one, not in the real sense of the term. A game of golf twice a week, but that's more for recreation and exercise, not exactly what we understand a hobby to be.

A true hobby, I would imagine, requires single-minded effort. You have to be dedicated to it for years; you pick up its lore, learn its skills, accumulate its equipment. You come to take pride in what you're doing and the progress you've made. Ideally, hobbies balance jobs. A desk worker tends to take to a manual activity like gardening; a group worker prefers to relax alone with a stamp or coin collection.

My father, a high school headmaster, had carpentry for a hobby. He had a huge wooden box full of carpenter's tools, which he used to make stools, benches and bookcases. We children were fascinated, seeing him at work. And he was indulgent enough to let us try our hand with various tools. Later, he took to beekeeping. Within a few years, he had a dozen boxed hives nestling in the back garden. And what delicious, fragrant honey he produced! I have never tasted the like of it again. Father could handle bees with his bare hands, a feat that sent his stock soaring sky-high in our eyes. Once, when the bees swarmed out of a hive, he followed them for miles, recaptured them in a basket covered with cloth and put them back where they belonged as another hive. I had a healthy dread of bees, but I would boast about ours as if they were handy pets that could be set upon our tormentors. So, as it turned out, Father's hobbies not only yielded him pleasure, but they enriched our lives too.

Over the last few decades, however, hobbies have been in marked decline. In fact, I fear that they may be threatened with extinction. Having a hobby is no longer particularly fashionable. Hobbies hardly figure in the popular magazines and are almost ignored by the advertising industry. The impression seems to have gained ground that hobbies are for the common herd, not for busy, successful people forging ahead with their lives.

Take the 1987 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I consulted recently. Looking under `hobby', I found certain birds of prey which glory in that name. And there was one American journalist, Oveta Culp Hobby. Hobby, as a leisure activity conducted in one's spare time, did not find mention at all. What has pushed hobbies into decline? It is information tools like computers, fax machines, the Internet, electronic mail, pagers and cellular phones, which are blurring the line between work and leisure, preventing us from allocating time specifically to each. Tied to these electronic leashes, people can't really relax at home. The decline of hobbies marks the decline of leisure.

Evidently, our lives are becoming far busier than ever before, and the process is fuelled by an unrelenting need to earn more. Everything has become expensive, while our expectation are ever on the rise. People work more because they have to work more; this is an economic fact. In this pressure to make more money, spare time and the spirit of fun associated with it is the first casualty. What little leisure we have left is snapped up by the ubiquitous television set. After a hard day's work, it's easier to sprawl before the TV set than sculpt in driftwood or paint miniatures. Of late, the Internet has become another compelling diversion. People sit for hours looking through Websites. But it's quite another matter if watching TV or surfing the Internet are categorised as hobbies. Hobbies do make life richer. More balanced, anyway. We need them. They constitute a fit call on our spare time. For our own sakes, the unglamorous image that hobbies have acquired must be dropped.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.