The Gentle Art of Collecting
Aften starting as a childhood hobby, collecting often endures into adulthood and thus becoming a lifelong pursuit. It usually starts as a meandering activity, with no particular use in mind. Stamps, currency notes and coins, scrapbooks of sports, sportspersons, film stars, their statistics, are common childhood passions. And yes, there are more… comic books, postcards, matchboxes, books, artwork, dolls, Dinky cars, photographs, cameras, artefacts, flags, caps, country souvenirs, are just a few examples. You name it, and you’ll have a collector for it.
Collecting is a good pastime. It is a purposeful pursuit that relieves you of boredom, hence a relaxing activity, which invariably leads to social connections. It making the collector part of a social network of like-minded persons. Many become experts on their collection.
Collecting is also associated with the need for the human brain to catalogue and organise information. Susan Engels, in her book, The Intellectual Lives of Children, suggests that the activities which preschoolers to senior school students engage in, how they observe the world and organise information in the form of how they collect and categorise for e.g. leaves, pebbles, marbles, dolls, pictures, etc. is eventually helping them to organise their thoughts and ideas that emerge in their minds. In short, children are learning how to think!
This fundamental structuring of the process of thinking plays an important role in the cognitive development of children and sets the foundation for a lifetime of learning through organised thinking.
Parents very often consider what their children are engrossed in collecting as frivolous and a waste of time. Rather they should be encouraging their children’s curiosity and their playful collection of whatever they take a fancy for.
Interestingly, Akshay Kumar collects posters of old films, Shah Rukh Khan gadgets, Ranveer Singh sunglasses, Salman Khan collects soaps, particularly organic. But meet some collectors of Sector 50. Pradeep Sharma of Shubhkamna Apartments collects stamps, coins, currency notes, political cartoons, and rare books. Gurvinder Singh of Sagar Apartment collects coins. Saurabh Agarwal of Palm Grove collects Indrajal comic books. There’s a 10-year-old with more than 300 Dinky cars in his collection! Certainly, there would be many more collectors in the societies around us!
