A strong play of passion

Unique hobbies

Playing with cars and movie figurines is a usual habit one adopts growing up. It’s when you turn that playtime into a hobby that it takes a different path — a path where you want to own all of them as you grow older.

Krishnan Vijayaraghavan, a user experience designer, is one such person who shares a similar story. It was his older brother who inspired him to collect these cool toys.

He recalls, “I still remember the scale model  of ‘Lamborghini Countach’ that my brother owned. The level of detail it had wasn’t like any of the other toys that I owned. That inspired me to collect whatever I found. Since I won’t be able to afford an actual Lamborghini in real life, this is my way of pampering myself.”

Krishnan started collecting about 10 years ago when he needed something to revive after his hectic days at work.

 He would purchase some of his favourites during his travels or go to various types of toy stores to buy them.

He has around 33 scale model cars of the 1:18 ratio. He also owns  around 11 planes of 1:200 ratio as part of his collection. “My dad is also an avid collector and he has gifted a few. The ‘supersonic jet Concorde’ is one of my favourites,” he exclaims.

As part of his collections are also Lego sets. He explains, “Growing up, my brother would get a lot of Legos as gifts, mainly the Lego Technic ones which are a type of advanced Lego sets. He used to use those techniques and create his own models. This intrigued my interest in wanting to try something on my own so I made a robotic hand with the Lego pieces.”

With his interest in robotics as well, Krishnan gets busy with the pieces during his free time. He also owns a rare ‘Lego Ferrari Enzo’, a 1:10 set, along with a Lego version of ‘Wall-E’.

And if one thinks that his craze for collectibles is already a lot, he still has more to offer! He’s also a huge fan of buying collectibles and memorabilia related to music. Since ‘The Beatles’ is one of his favourites, he has a variety of the bands collectibles as well. He explains, “So far I have the ‘Beatles’ miniature drum kit and a miniature version of Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass guitar. I also like to collect interesting figurines of ‘Batman’, ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Tintin’.”

It’s also difficult to keep this kind of passions and hobbies alive as they are quite the price to pay.

However, this enthusiastic collector thinks that he hasn’t spent all that much for his collectibles. “When I started collecting, everything would cost only within Rs 1,800, but that’s easily bumped up to Rs 3,000 these days. I know many who buy these as an investment — they still maintain it unboxed and hope to sell it in the future for profit. I’d like to keep looking at mine, so my house is dedicated just for these collectibles.” Though he has about everything possible in his collection, he is hoping that one day he can afford to buy the John Lennon’s ‘Rolls Royce’ scale model version.

Explaining his passion for his hobby, Krishnan proudly says, “There are two types of people in this world — one would think ‘why are you still playing with toys’, and the others who wish they could have what you have. I just decided to make myself happy with the things that I like and let their two kinds of people walk in and out of my lives.”