Hobbies for Marriage Biodata: 50 Examples You Can Copy

Write three or four things you actually do, and give each one a detail: how long you've done it, how often, or what you've done with it. "Reading, music, travelling" could sit on any biodata. "Hindustani vocal (eight years), a Himalayan trek every summer, reads mostly Marathi fiction" could only be yours.

The hobbies row is short, and it's one of the few places on a biodata where a family gets a sense of what you're like rather than what you've achieved. It's also the row where it's easiest to fall back on the same four words. Here's the difference one detail makes:

Hobbies: Reading, listening to music, travelling, cooking

Hobbies: Reads crime fiction, mostly in Hindi. Learning the tabla (second year). Cooks a full South Indian breakfast every Sunday.

The second isn't much longer, but a reader can picture the person, and they've got three things to ask about when you meet.

Below are 50 lines to borrow from, grouped by kind. After them: how to turn any hobby into a line like these, complete examples for a girl's and a boy's biodata, and what's better left off.

50 hobby lines you can copy

Each line is written the way it would sit on a biodata. Pick the ones that are true of you, change the details to yours, and join three or four with commas or full stops. Where a line names a place, a number or a book, swap in your own. The detail is what makes the line work, and a borrowed one falls apart the first time someone asks about it.

Music and dance

• Hindustani vocal, eight years of training, still has a weekly class
• Plays the guitar, mostly old Hindi film songs, mostly for friends
• Bharatanatyam: trained for twelve years, arangetram in 2014
• Tabla, second year, learning from a teacher near home
• Garba every Navratri, and joins a class for the month before
• Keyboard, self-taught from YouTube, plays at family functions
• Goes to the December music season in Chennai most years

Sport and fitness

• Plays cricket for an office team on Sunday mornings
• Badminton three evenings a week
• Runs: two half marathons so far, training for a third
• Yoga every morning, for about six years now
• Swims twice a week at the municipal pool
• Cycles to work, and does a long ride on Sundays
• Five-a-side football with college friends on weekends

Outdoors and travel

• Trekking: Kedarkantha, Hampta Pass and Sandakphu so far, one Himalayan trek a year
• Climbs a Sahyadri fort most monsoon weekends
• Birdwatching, keeps a list of every species seen (about 180 so far)
• Plans the family's yearly trip, and has been to 19 states
• Prefers trains to flights, and has travelled most of the North-East by rail
• Camping with old school friends, two or three trips a year

Reading, writing and learning

• Reads mostly history and biographies, about two books a month
• Reads Malayalam fiction, working through M.T. Vasudevan Nair's novels
• Writes a blog about Lucknow's food, posts every couple of weeks
• Learning Japanese, cleared JLPT N4 last year
• Quizzing with the city quiz club, goes to a quiz most months
• Doing a weekend course in UX design, out of curiosity
• Has kept a daily journal for ten years

Cooking and food

• Cooks most weekends, mostly Gujarati and Thai food
• Bakes sourdough bread, and the starter is now three years old
• Makes pickles with my grandmother every summer
• Tries a new restaurant every week and keeps notes on the good ones
• Cooks a full South Indian breakfast for the family every Sunday

Making things

• Photography, mostly street and people, on an old film camera
• Sketching, fills a sketchbook every couple of months
• Terrace gardening: vegetables, herbs and about forty pots
• Pottery, a weekly class for the last two years
• Woodwork, has made most of the shelves at home
• Builds small electronics projects with an Arduino
• Knits, and makes something for every new baby in the family

Games, puzzles and following sport

• Chess, plays online most nights
• Solves the newspaper crossword every morning
• Board games with friends, hosts a game night once a month
• Carrom, family champion two Diwalis running
• Follows Test cricket closely and never misses an India series

Volunteering and faith

• Teaches maths to Class 10 students at an NGO on Saturdays
• Blood donor, fifteen donations so far
• Seva at the gurdwara langar most Sundays
• Sings in the parish choir
• Helps organise the housing society's Ganeshotsav every year
• Volunteers at an animal shelter, and has fostered three puppies

Whether faith goes in the hobbies row is your call. Some families like to see it there, and some people would rather keep it to the religion row. If you include it, write it as something you do, like the lines above, rather than as a description of how religious you are.

How to turn any hobby into a line like these

Every line above does the same thing: it names the hobby and adds one fact. Four kinds of fact work.

• How long: "eight years of training", "since college".
• How often: "three evenings a week", "every Sunday".
• How far you've got: "second year", "two half marathons", "JLPT N4".
• Something you made or did: "most of the shelves at home", "arangetram in 2014".

One fact is enough. Two is the most a line can carry before it starts reading like a CV.

Then choose three or four, and choose the ones you'd be happy to talk about for ten minutes. A hobby on a biodata is mostly something to talk about when you meet, and a row of seven tells a reader less than a row of three, because it reads as a list rather than a person.

On most formats hobbies is a single row, not a paragraph, so keep it to a line or two. The longer version belongs in About Me, which comes up further down.

For a girl's biodata, and a boy's

Searches ask for hobbies "for a girl" and "for a boy", but there isn't a different list. Everything above works on either biodata. What differs is the advice people tend to get.

On a girl's biodata, someone in the family may suggest adding cooking, stitching or rangoli because they think other families will look for them. List them if they're true and you enjoy them. If they aren't, leave them off. Anything on the row is something you'll be asked about, and if cooking matters to a family, it'll come up in conversation. Better that it comes up honestly.

On a boy's biodata, don't let the row become an afterthought. On a biodata that's otherwise degrees and job titles, it's the one line that says what he's like outside work.

Here are four complete lifestyle sections, two of each, with the hobbies row and the two rows that usually sit next to it.

Hobbies: Bharatanatyam (arangetram in 2014, still practises on weekends),
trekking, reads mostly crime fiction
Travel: One Himalayan trek a year; Kedarkantha and Hampta Pass so far
Weekend Activities: Dance practice on Saturday mornings, Sunday lunch with
my parents in Mysuru

Hobbies: Badminton three evenings a week. Cooks Gujarati and Thai food,
mostly on weekends. Learning Japanese (cleared JLPT N4 last year).
Travel: Prefers slow trips, a week in one place rather than five cities
Weekend Activities: Badminton, a new café with friends, family dinner on Sundays

Hobbies: Runs (two half marathons so far), climbs a Sahyadri fort most
monsoon weekends, plays the keyboard at family functions
Travel: Road trips, mostly within Maharashtra and Goa
Weekend Activities: A long run on Sunday mornings, cooks dinner for the family

Hobbies: Writes a blog about Lucknow's food, quizzing with the city quiz
club, solves the newspaper crossword every morning
Travel: Goes by train wherever possible; has been to 19 states
Weekend Activities: A quiz on Saturday evenings, Sunday mornings in the old
city's markets with friends

If your format only has a hobbies row, fold the best of the travel and weekend lines into it and keep the total to four.

What to leave off, or reword

The usual four on their own. "Reading, music, travelling, cooking" isn't wrong, but so many biodatas say it that it tells a reader nothing. Keep any that are true and add the detail: what you read, which music, where you've been.

Pastimes everyone has. "Listening to music", "watching movies", "surfing the internet", "making friends". If one of them is genuinely a big part of your life, say what makes it yours. "Watches a lot of Malayalam cinema" is a hobby. "Watching movies" describes almost everybody.

Hobbies you've stopped. If you played table tennis for your district at school and haven't touched a bat since, put it in the past tense or save it for conversation. "Table tennis" on its own invites a match you'll lose.

Adjectives. "Passionate about photography", "avid reader", "foodie". Swap the adjective for a fact. "Reads about two books a month" says what "avid reader" was trying to.

Anything you'd rather not be asked about. Every hobby on the row is an invitation to talk about it. If you'd rather not discuss something at a first meeting, it doesn't have to be here. Just don't keep a real part of your life from someone you're getting serious about.

The hobbies row or About Me?

Both, but they do different jobs. The hobbies row is a quick list a reader takes in at a glance. About Me is where you say what your week actually looks like, and a hobby can show up there as part of that: "I play badminton three evenings a week, and it's the one plan I don't cancel."

Don't copy the row into the paragraph word for word. If the row says badminton, About Me can say who you play with, or why you started. The guide to writing the about me section has worked examples, and the complete guide to making a biodata shows where both sit on the page.

Filling it in on Marriage Profile

Hobbies is a field in step four of the form, Lifestyle and Personality, alongside travel preferences, weekend activities and life goals. On the finished biodata they appear together under a Lifestyle heading. A row you leave empty doesn't appear at all, and if all four are empty the heading goes too, so there's no need to invent a travel line to fill a gap.

If the biodata is read in Hindi, Marathi or Gujarati, the hobbies row is translated along with the rest of the prose, and its label reads रुचियाँ, आवडीनिवडी or શોખ. A grandparent who reads Gujarati more comfortably than English can read it in Gujarati.

The link stays the same when you edit the biodata. So when you finish that third half marathon, or quietly give up on the guitar, change the row, and everyone who already has the link sees the new one.