Growing up in a middle-class family in India, I couldn’t afford to have real hobbies. I was good at sports, winning all possible medals on the one sports day a year. My parents were incredibly proud of me but sadly couldn’t make me a real athlete. The only real thing I actually became good at is work. I have an incredible work ethic and take real pride in being a good scientist.
Now that I am older and make a decent living, I have no excuse not to pursue a hobby for my own mental well-being. Social media obviously doesn’t help when you see all these amazing people doing it all. All the years without social media, I thought it was totally acceptable not to have a real hobby. In fact, I didn’t even realize hobbies were real until I was much older.
I remember one summer when I was 10-12 years old. Two women in our building dropped off a summer art camp flyer outside my apartment. It had really cool art projects – candle making, glass painting, bread art, chocolate making, tile art etc. My mom couldn’t afford to send me to this camp. It was a whopping $10! So she somehow convinced the two women, who couldn’t say no to my mom, to let me “help” them conduct the summer camp.
I was excited, but Mom made it very clear that I was only there to help them and not actually use anything for myself. I was there to work. What a good worker I was – I stuck to not using any resources, just watching, helping other kids glue things, paint things, and clean up. The two women were very kind and never let me feel like a freeloader. In fact, they would let me do some art myself by telling me it was extra or scraps when, in hindsight, I know it wasn’t. Mostly I just observed and did all the art in my brain.
Cut to more than half a decade later, when I was roommates with Su, who happened to be an amazing artist. She was just born with immense talent, and I was lucky to be living with her. We would save up our pocket money to buy art supplies from wholesalers, traveling across the city to pick up supplies because they were cheaper at the manufacturing locations. We started recreating all the things I had learned from art camp – painting, tile cards, making fancy chocolates at 3 AM, baking using a pressure cooker at midnight, everything. I never considered myself artistic because Su was just supremely talented, but with her, I did the hustling. I was the planner and she was the artist. It was fun nevertheless.
Now a decade later, I am six months pregnant. I haven’t done much artwork except designing beautiful experiments. My friends at work gave me a $100 gift card for my birthday. Being super pregnant, I didn’t really need anything, so I thought of pursuing a hobby. From summer camp, the only thing I hadn’t tried myself was candle making. I had seen it done, and I knew my brain could totally do it, no problem.
I spent 10 minutes on the internet convincing myself I could not just make candles for fun – I could commercialize them and be totally amazing at it. So I spent $100 and another $100 to buy not just a small candle-making kit but went all out: five kilos of soy wax, more than 100 wicks, hundreds of hexagonal bottles (because round bottles were too cliché), black stickers, and chalk pens for labels. I got more than 50 fragrances ranging from flowers to straight-up wood because I wanted to be inclusive. I even got a fancy thermometer because just guesswork by looking at melted wax is not good science – I needed to standardize this entire process for batch-to-batch consistency.
I was going to make millions selling these at the farmers’ market or maybe via a global website shipping orders all over the world. I started deciding on the name of my company, my target audience, and where I’d donate 10% of my earnings because, come on, I wanted to be not just a millionaire but a philanthropist millionaire. All of this without pouring a single candle.
When I finally tried making one, the strong concentrated fragrances gave my pregnant self headaches followed by nausea. So I had to stop. “Maybe once I push this baby out, I’ll pursue my hobby again,” is what I thought. Life moved on, and all the things were neatly packed in the box they came in. We had a baby, moved houses, and the box moved with us. Five years and an additional kid later, we decided to move to the Netherlands and needed to downsize. We found the box again, and this time, instead of just falsely believing that candle making was something I truly wanted to pursue, I decided to donate it all for someone else to actually enjoy this calming process.
These days, I’ve realized that perhaps my real hobby has always been right in front of me – designing beautiful experiments in the lab. After all, isn’t science just another form of art, where precision meets creativity? And unlike my candle-making empire dreams, this one actually pays the bills. Maybe I am artistic, maybe I have a lot of unfinished hobbies, but I’ve learned that it’s okay. Because between designing experiments and dreaming up business empires, I’ve mastered the most important hobbies of all – the ability to daydream, laugh at myself, and tell a story worth sharing.
Element J 