Toastmasters Speech # 3 : Impact of Hobbies / Hobbies do wonders

Imagine this scene.

It is a usual Monday Morning and your mood is right up [gesture low hand pointing to the ground] here.

You come or rather drag yourself to your workplace and a Colleague asks “Hey man… how was the weekend? Anything interesting?”

Most of us just shrug and whimper with a dull reply, “The usual”.

Happens, right?

I’m sure that you wouldn’t have shrugged if you had spent your weekend doing something which you enjoy.

Mister / Madam Toastmaster Fellow Toastmasters Distinguished Guests

Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, once said,

“You never lose a dream , it just incubates as a hobby.”

Today I would talk about Hobbies. Hobbies are activities which you “USED” to enjoy doing in your leisure time. But now you are simply “BUSY”.

Most of us do have something or the other as our hobby. Everyone likes to do something when they have nothing else to do right?
Some like to solve puzzles or crosswords, some like to sing or dance , some like to read and some like to play. Some like to do Gardening. Some like to cook.

And then there are some, who just like to eat and sleep or ‘Netflix and Chill’. And they’re , indeed, living the best life.

HASHTAG #SARCASM

Do anyone here like to share some of THEIR hobbies? Anything unique?

See, We all lead a very busy life. So we need something to unwind ourselves. To take us to back to our roots. To do things which makes us feel happier. Don’t we?

Today, I would share with you the impact of hobbies which I had on my own life.

I Like to indulge in visual arts. As in, I sometimes Draw Cartoons , Click Pictures , Spend Hours on Photoshopping them. Also I create Posters , Design Logos and so on on so forth.

5th Jan, 2012, a hindi movie “Mr. India”, was being shown on TV. I used to love that movie as a child. So I decided to create a small poster for the movie. Just as a tribute.

Mr. India
Mr. India Minimal Poster

This shows Anil Kapoor and Sridevi through a red glass. Those who have seen the movie would get it easily. Those who haven’t , just hold on. This is a Minimal Poster where very little or just the core of the story is shown.

What happened after, is that I shared this on my blog, Facebook and Twitter and got a very positive response. This prompted me to create some more posters for some more movies and TV shows. I enjoyed making them and my friends continued with the praise. I wasn’t doing anything special . I was just passing my time by creating minimalistic tributes to the movies I had enjoyed myself. Just to feel nostalgic .

Slide3
Some of the posters

Then I created more posters . Now in non-Hindi languages as well. I’ve created close to 200 posters by now.

When the blog got popular, it finally got noticed by some movie makers and then some journalists. Then this started happening.

Newspapers and Magazines
Newspapers and Magazines articles

I got popular.

I got interviewed many times. My posters have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines. I am not saying that I am very good at it. Far from it! Just that I kept pursuing my hobbies and others liked that. It made me famous and gave me something to brag about and encouraged me to keep doing it over and over again.

My point is , who knows where your hobbies could lead you to. You are doing it just for fun . But you never know , what impact could they have on you and people around you.

Thus, I would just encourage and request you all to take some time out and do what you like, other than usual working for 8 hours a day.

Take out that old guitar which you always wanted to play but never took time out. Go join some dance classes and start flying again. Lately, there has been no Philately but who is stopping you from collecting stamps again. You like to cook? Be better at it and who knows you could land into Masterchef one day?

Even if you don’t, at least you’d have spent your time in doing something you liked and enjoyed. Isn’t that good in itself?

I would depart with the following quote from Warren Buffett, often called the world’s richest man,

“Whatever YOU like to do , make it a hobby and
whatever the WORLD likes to do , make that a business.”


Here’s a rehearsal recording of the speech:

Minimal Poster – F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Made some minimal posters for FRIENDS (TV Series from 1994-2004)

Friends Minimal Poster
Friends Minimal Poster

Monica
Monica

Joey
Joey

Chandler
Chandler

Ross
Ross

Rachel
Rachel

Phoebe
Phoebe

Monica's Apartment
Monica’s Apartment

Joey & Chandler's Apartment
Joey & Chandler’s Apartment

 

More minimal posters on:

http://MinimalMoviePosters.in and http://Facebook.com/MinimalMoviePostersIndia

Indian Comics Superheroes Minimal Posters

Made some minimal posters for Indian Comics Superheroes from Raj Comics because of this

Bankelal
Bankelal

Doga
Doga

Nagraj
Nagraj

Parmanu
Parmanu

Super Commando Dhruv
Super Commando Dhruv

Minimal Hollywood Posters – Second Edition

Django Unchained
Django Unchained

They Live
They Live

The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker

Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty

Office Space
Office Space

Argo
Argo

 

Minimal Hollywood Posters – First Edition

I'm not a movie buff

Yes, I am not a movie buff. I don’t watch movies much nor do I remember them for long. I think I stopped taking movies seriously after 1994. I last danced (without being pulled over in a baraat or DJ in college) on Pak-Chik-Pak-Raja-Babu (The song lifted from Chikku-Bukku-Raile and made ‘awesome’ by Govinda by wearing Michael Jackson’s Bad attire) on my own by doing all those moves and rolling over the floor dancing / ROFD. I could also do that stuff kids used to do back then which was imitating a fan by rotating one of your legs squatting on another leg while dancing. I have seen Allu Arjun do the same recently. He only got to know about it now? Poor chap.

When I was growing up I was told that watching movies is not a good thing at all. Instead, it was taught that one should concentrate on studies. I used to play a lot and watched Cricket at odd times. But no movies. Probably because my experience of watching movies was weird. Once I had to gone to watch the movie Dil along with my uncle when I was just 3.5 ft tall in a nearby movie theater called as ‘Lakshmi Mandir’ in Jaipur. Now they show only 18+ movies there sadly. Or rather good for some. While I was entering the hall, because of it being crowded, I got lost in the darkness. When my uncle finally found me after 10 minutes, my cheeks were all wet because of tears. I mean how can a 3.5 ft tall guy tolerate being lost in darkness while Saeed Jaffrey unleash wrath on Aamir Khan and Madhuri. Then once I went to see Bol Radha Bol with my parents (I think that was the last movie I saw with my father and mother together in a theater). Sadly, we couldn’t see the climax because my younger brother kept on weeping throughout the movie and father decided to go home because he didn’t want others to get disturbed. I felt so bad that I told them that ‘leave me and go, I will come back on my own’. He instantly declined the plea because it was a night show and I was just 3.7 ft tall. Later, I got the video cassette of the movie and watched it on VCR at home itself. I loved the movie by the way. During the period from ’94 till ’98, I just watched very less Hindi movies and usually Animated movies or Jurassic Park sequels only in theaters. Including Godzilla.

Studies weren’t helping either. Probably I was in 7th and read this beauty of a story in Hindi called as ‘Punchlight (पंच लाइट)’ by Phanishwar Nath ‘Renu’. It was a story about a village where the Punch (village headmen) weren’t able to use a Petromax lamp and then a guy called Godhan (who was considered a useless and छलिया types guy because he used to watch many movies and sing indecent songs from them) helped them because he knew stuffs. Although the story was pro-movie watching as it said that watching movies makes you aware of stuffs but till then I had decided that movie watching is a waste of time.

Now after coming to Bangalore, the only pastime left here is watching movies because there is nothing else to do in this city frankly. In past 2 years, I watched more movies than I had watched all my life. Moreover MMP happened. I got in touch with so many people who are movies aficionados that I feel awkward to comment on anything. I have been often called as a movie buff whenever MMPIndia was featured in newspapers which made me feel bit weird. If one makes some graphics out of movies, that doesn’t mean that he is into movies or anything as such. But. But I don’t hate movies. I just hate useless movies. I admire some cinematic brilliance and want to know more and more about those people and watch all the movies they have made. People can discuss lengths about certain characters portrayal on Twitter and write thousands of words on what they interpreted about certain movies on their blogs. I don’t. I don’t review movies because art is subjective and carrying out discussions over fiction is not my cup of tea till now. The movies which were offered to us in 90s and 2000s kept me at bay as well. When I watch a 70s movie, they look so much better (and so slow but still good) because their content was worth watching. Seriously, if you keep feeding a person with bad quality food, one day he get used to it. And when suddenly you serve him great quality food, he won’t like it at all. The taste of the movies of my friends has moulded in such a way that they can watch Salman Khan movies and like them. I cannot. For me to become a movie buff, I need to see better movies. Better directors who are plenty in number nowadays can do that. There are some great people on Twitter who know a lot about movies and I am keen on learning from that. Being an Indian, one cannot be separated from Movies and Cricket. Hence, I should not get away anyways.

Having said that, if you find out the number of movies an Indian watches on an average, I would still have seen lesser number of movies than that number. And I would like to keep that this way. As they say that if you start watching more and more movies, you begin to explore for more and more about them. I am currently in that phase.

Bol Radha Bol
Bol Radha Bol

 

P.S.: I watched Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola today and liked it instantly. Great quirky and intelligent humor. I recommend it and refrain from giving any rating.