Suresh Menon: Catching the collecting bug

When I was a child I collected dead bugs. I have no idea why, except my teacher urged us in class to collect - since it was a wonderful hobby. I had dived under my desk just then and could not hear the words after ‘collect', and somehow decided it was ‘dead bugs'. I hated bugs, dead or alive, but I was at that stage when pleasing the teacher was of paramount importance, and if she had said slaying dragons was a useful hobby for schoolchildren, I would have taken that up.

When you are young, there are so many things that make no sense - why should the sky be blue, why should we go to school, and so on - that collecting dead bugs did not seem particularly weird. In a few days I realised that what the teacher had suggested was collecting stamps. That didn't make sense either. I went around briefly asking friends and family to stamp me on my shoes, and they didn't think it was weird because they thought I was going through a phase. They were right - I had misunderstood what the teacher meant by ‘stamp'. It was a lesson in classroom behaviour and why one should not dive under the desk when a lesson is in progress.

But by then my dead bugs collection was the talk of the classroom, and I was beginning to enjoy a certain amount of notoriety so it was difficult to give up my original hobby. Stamps were forgotten (although I slyly returned some of them when friends were least expecting it), and I became that guy with the smelly matchboxes who became an authority on dead bugs, the same three or four types I picked up off the window sill.

Then briefly I collected words that began and ended with the letter ‘y', like ‘yesterday' and ‘yearly', in preparation for a word game where you made a word with the last letter of the word your opponent used. There were few words that began with ‘y' (at least when you were a certain age).

I was taken back to my collecting days in childhood when I read about a museum that is collecting human brains. The difference between collecting dead bugs and human brains or dead bugs and Picassos isn't much. The principle is the same - we collect to impress or please someone, to overcome a challenge, complete a task, for sheer joy, to make a profit, and because we have nothing better to do. Hitler collected Bavarian 18th-century furniture, Imelda Marcos collected shoes, Idi Amin videos of the television series I Love Lucy.

They probably started out by collecting dead bugs as children.