She has over 35 pairs of hoops, studs, danglers, and rings in her collection. Yet, a very modest Yukta says, "It's not that much," and later asks, "Is it?" Yukta attributes her collection to a friend when she was in school, who she knew stored her vast collection in a Ferrero Rocher box. "We once bought the same kind of earring in two different colors, and exchanged one, so that we could each have a pair with different colors," she says.
Why exactly she collects it, she finds it difficult to tell. "It's not for fashion," she insists. "I'd like to call my collection edgy and hippie. I guess you could say that I like them because they speak to me in a certain way," she says. She calls her collection minimalistic in design. Turquoise is her favorite color and she likes anything in that shade. Her all-time favorite is a big blue triangle design with three layers. "Someone once praised it saying it was like a painting," she says happily.
She buys earrings depending on her frame of mind. "There are different phases. There have been times where I wore a single pair for the longest time and simply abused it," she says. One time, she was into earpieces shaped like leaves ("Because they're different from the ones you normally see.") and now she's into ear cuffs. There are also a couple of pairs of 'book' earrings that are precious to her, which stand testimony to her love of writing. Her current favorite are studs shaped like elephants, which reminds her of a friend, who they nicknamed 'elephant.'
Her collection has taken a definite shape consisting of items bought and gifted by herself and various people. "There are several in my collection that I wouldn't have bought myself if I had seen them at the store, but because someone gave them to me, I can see that they're pretty," she says. It took time, of course. And during that time, she has given away a few to those close to her heart, lost a few, and the rest, are kept in boxes. "I need to find a way to organize them better," she says.
With so much of love for earrings, Yukta even went to take earring making classes sometime last year ("It could be March or August," says a gleeful Yukta), but she made it to only a couple of them.
Yukta's fetish with earrings is matched by her fixation with notebooks. When she found one that was within her price range, she was shocked, and off she went on a binge buying the notebooks. She later gave them to her friends, but she regularly visits handicraft stores to look for the perfect notebook. Ever so grammar conscious, she dislikes buying notebooks if they have spelling mistakes on the cover, or cheesy lines for that matter.
For her, this is just the start of many things she will go on to collect in life. "I can't buy art pieces right now, so until then, earrings and notebooks will have to do," she says.
As told to Sachi Mulmi
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