John Lobo’s kittens are not his own. Neither are the sparrows that eat regularly from the plate of corn kept on the parapet of the front veranda of his house. He also remembers to keep a slightly bigger bowl of water next to the plate of corn. When the fish vendor arrives, he buys a small variety of fish, regularly. He cuts them into three or four pieces each. He gets out of his veranda with fish pieces in a small plate in his left hand, and a small litter of cats, a couple of elder ones too, look up at his hand and start mewing together, almost in a rhythmical manner. He gives a piece of fish each to the young ones first. Indeed, the elder ones patiently wait and they get fed later. A close scrutiny of John and his feeding systems will easily show that John is very much interested in cats and birds. He also has a couple of dogs that he domesticates. The dogs don’t chase the birds or the cats. All three sets of animals are trained well not to interfere with one another. John’s interest is honest, and therefore, he has developed certain skills to practise his interest. Evidently, his resource is his interest and his interest is not an imitation of what anybody else does. It emerges from his traits and his values, two areas of human resource and he uses his body, yet another area of human resource, to express the areas of his resource. It is also possible that he has a belief system that it is his responsibility to share food with those animals which live around him.

Interests are products of either traits or values or both. There are patterns of interests in most humans and they pursue them. A large number of people have imitative interests, just because somebody else is doing something, they also want to do the same. Cloth culture and the interest associated with it are largely imitative. Someone stitches clothes in a particular way, others imitate them. Imitative interests do not have any permanence. They get replaced by another imitation. Most people have imitative interests like gardening or keeping animal pets. After a short while, they will lose their interest because it was only an imitation of what they had seen elsewhere.

The simple matter is that imitative interests may have a natural death, sooner or later. Also, there are possibilities that interests are not identified by a person in the younger years. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, did his engineering studies at Istanbul Technical University and dropped out after three years. Then he did his graduation in journalism in Istanbul University. A couple of years later, he took to writing and published his first book, Darkness and Light, in 1979 when he was almost twenty-seven years old. Engineering and journalism are not even subjects in his novel. In an interview, he is supposed to have answered a question by stating that he did not know that he had an interest in writing during his days of studies.

There are cultivable interests. Parents and teachers are capable of cultivating interests in the young, especially in the latter’s schooling days. In many cases, even disciplining a child in the systems of family behaviour will depend on cultivating interest to behave as per the models made available. It is difficult to cultivate interest in adults because specific interests would have already been developed. Patterns of interest may change based on changes in values. For example, a vegetarian who was so without specific belief systems or principles might give up vegetarianism because of different types of influences. It will be beneficial to consider a phrase coined by Annette Lareau, professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania University who wrote the book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. After careful study, she used the phrase ‘concerted cultivation’ that is necessary in developing children. Creation of interest needs concerted cultivation where the desired interest is identified and patrons promote such interests in individuals. This is possible even in a corporate organisation where different interest patterns could be identified and those interested in a specific area could be put together to cultivate the interest. Similarly, in centres of education, learners interested in a specific area could be grouped together and concerted efforts could be put to promote specific interests. All the same, it is difficult to convert imitative interests to authentic interests even with concerted efforts by patrons like teachers, parents or superior officers because imitation has an amount of temporariness. Additionally, imitations may have subjective seeming benefits which may disappear soon.

Sometime in November 2009, Amitabh Bachchan, the film actor of eminence, spoke to the press about his cancelling shooting, many times, to watch Sachin Tendulkar at play. Bachchan usually refers to the magic in Tendulkar’s game and becomes very talkative about it. He is supposed to have told journalists that his interest in watching Sachin play cricket is equal to Sachin’s interest in playing cricket. Though both are connected to cricket, and their interests are authentic, the application of their interests is different. Interests reflect traits and values and are permanent when they are products of strong belief systems. In such cases, the interest will also be authentic. A person’s life becomes dear to her when authentic interests reach higher levels of satisfaction. Of course, this will depend on the discovery of the authentic interest by the individual. People feel an inadequacy when their authentic interests are not satisfied. Any resource development plan should include identification of authentic interest and planning definite systems to help people identify their authentic interest. A major job of parents and teachers, especially in schools and colleges, should be to take a student through several activities and streams of experience so that she will be able to discover what her authentic interests are.

Interests are of three types; namely, imitative, cultivable and authentic; development of which will depend on the patronage and support they receive from others, especially parents and teachers.

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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru. Email: tharappans@gmail.com