Since school days, I
have been asked about my favourite hobbies. It always used to be reading, I
remember. I used to be engrossed in books, lost in a faraway land, oblivious to
the real world around me, hunger, sleep and other such attention-seekers
ignored. It was more often than not that my mom would find me sitting in one
place, in one attitude for hours at stretch, irritable if disturbed. Books were
my drugs and I was badly hooked. To the words, the ideas, the world they
painted. I couldn’t get enough. I'd stay up complete nights, with a
torch in hand under my blanket, and solve mysteries with Fatty, Beth and all
their friends, or go to school with Darrell, Gwendoline and all of their
friends, or visit the Faraway Tree with all it's inhabitants. My birthday
gifts were novels and even when not my birthday, most of my purchases were
novels. Fiction, non fiction, romance, thriller, mystery- you name it and I’d
tried it.
Then I came to college
and started watching a lot of movies, TV series and the like. For the first
year and a half, I’ve nearly watched a movie and/or more than an episode of
some TV series, every day. I also read books, but the number of books had dwindled
for a while. People said this was to be expected on moving out of home, since
freedom, unlimited quick internet and certain stages of adolescence do that to
people. But suddenly, these getaways seemed to be things I had to be warned
against, things I had to be stopped from doing. I got confused, as the feeling
movies evoked in me was quite similar in some ways to the one evoked by books
previously. And no one really had a problem with the books, at least not as
much as with the TV series.
Upon pondering a bit, I
figured movies and books both sold a dream, a life I wasn’t living but could be
living. They both meant that I could have no problems of mine to worry about in
the time I was engrossed in them. I realized what we all (or maybe it’s just
me) look for is escape. Escape, for the world is indeed meaningless. Life
indeed has no purpose. We just exist in the realm we think exists. And
sometimes, for most of us, one realm isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to be one
person, with one person’s life, relations and problems. I want to live all the
lives I’m not living, an explorer, a detective, a doctor, a vagabond, even a
criminal or an adulteress. I like to feel what the characters in my books and
movies feel. More often than not, I end up crying at both, but I love that I
can. I can feel and understand and imagine someone so well, because sometimes,
just sometimes, that reality is more real and dear to me than my supposed
'real' reality.
Dreaming is my
favourite pass-time, my favourite hobby and while I may have various methods of
doing it, the end result is always the same. Escape. Call me a coward if you
will, escapist is not what all want to be. But problems become easier to solve
when not personal, when viewed from a distance and dreaming is the way in which
my life itself becomes less personal to me. So I plan on dreaming away the
nights in unconscious images conjured by my mind's slumber-induced creativity,
and dreaming away days in planning (im)possible futures, beautiful events, and
happy endings.
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