There’s also a less linear, but in my opinion, essential byproduct of pursuing a hobby on the side of your day job: it allows you to regularly interact with people from different walks of life that you wouldn’t ordinarily meet. “Once you join the workforce, you tend to get boxed in,” expresses Kezia Anna Mammen, who got together with her St. Stephen’s classmates Mishka Lepps and Sonalika Aggarwal to develop unLecture, which hosts university-level lectures on topics like star clusters or computational gastronomy in bars and coffee shops. “Doctors only interact with other doctors, architects only interact with other architects, I know lawyers who don’t have friends who are not lawyers. It makes you lose perspective and stop caring about the world outside that box.” The talks then become icebreakers for people to connect over. “We’ve started to notice that people who came by themselves for the first couple of lectures started to stick around and grab a drink together afterwards,” adds Aggarwal. “I think that’s so nice, you see someone in the same space over time, and you just end up becoming friends.” According to Harsh Snehanshu, who co-founded multi-city lecture community Pint of View with Shruti Sah, and has watched lectures sell out within hours, the community is half the draw. “There was a lecture on black holes that got sold out very quickly, and funnily enough, that same lecture was already on YouTube for free,” he shares. “We sent the link to people who couldn’t get tickets, but they insisted they would wait for us to host it again, as they wanted to attend in person.”
Hobbies can open up new avenues for you to apply your core professional expertise in ways that your formal job doesn’t allow, as I learned from dermatologist Shareeq Khan, whom I met while volunteering at a public park–turned-food forest in Mumbai. Khan is the founder of private label cosmetics manufacturer Neuriva Life Sciences, where he is looking into how stress and pollution impact skin health. While dermatology usually addresses this through medication or topical treatments, Khan’s experience working in the park taught him how even small pockets of green can minimise the amount of dust floating through a space. He rallied folks in his building to convert a once-dilapidated compound into a garden. “I used to immediately develop red rashes on my skin when I would sit in the compound of the building, but after we brought in all the greenery, that went down,” he shares. “A lot of people used to get dengue during the monsoons, but since the cleanup, there hasn’t been a single case.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
