John Seemon has devoted his life to playing with tiny, bright and colourful building blocks. This Lego fanatic allows Malavika Velayanikal into his mini kingdom. From outside, it looks like just another modest apartment. But enter techie John Seemon’s home on the fourth floor of a building opposite the swanky DLF layout in Bangalore, and you behold a whole new world. On the dining table — or what it once was — is an N-scale (1:150) model rail with two trains running. A replica of the Taj Mahal and a musical carousel face them diagonally. An assortment of models — trucks, jeeps, cranes, a Mercedes Unimog, a JCB excavator, tankers and a police station — adorn his living room. Boxes filled with Lego bricks — tens of thousands of them — of every color, shape and size crowd the floor of one room. On the bar counter is a model of the London Bridge and a street of complex modular structures with tiny people inside and outside. Eyes gleaming, Seemon points out the embellishments.
“Do you see that post-box? The cap hung on the wall? That frog on the door sill?” Welcome to Seemon’s private Legoland. “People are often surprised by how I know exactly what is where,” he says, picking up a leaflet of a modular set he had built. “This is just 30 percent of what I own,” he adds, gesturing at his stash. “The rest is packed away.” When the Lego bug bites Seemon is what the people at Lego call an AFOL (adult fan of Lego). , an online forum that Seemon runs for such fans in India, there are 25 registered AFOLs. With his private collection of 2.5 lakh bricks, Seemon says he is just one of three or four large Lego collectors in the country. The 39-year-old techie has been doing this for 15 years. Seemon was first introduced to Lego when he was about 10 years old. He took it up as a serious hobby only in the 1990s when he bought some Technic sets from the US. In the 2000s, he acquired a huge chunk of his Lego collection during stints in the US, Australia, Singapore and France.
Some were lucky buys in India, where Lego has been available in a big way since 2010. Lego has a cult following worldwide. It has spawned a parallel ecosystem in the West with dedicated museums, workshops, contests, clubs and networks like LUGNET (Lego Users Group Network) dedicated to everything about Lego. India too has its share of big collectors and die-hard enthusiasts and Lego draws upon them when they have exhibition events that involve building large and complex structures. For such events, the company usually looks for master builders who have a high level of expertise in building Lego structures. These people can sift through millions of tiny pieces, see the “system” and build a structure. Seemon is one of two master builders in the country, and in 2011, he led 1,500 kids and adults to build an 8x12 foot fire truck at Mumbai’s Phoenix Mills. “It is the biggest Lego structure in India and entered the Limca Books of Records,” says Roni Varghese, product manager of Funskool India Ltd, the official distributors of Lego in India.
Seemon is their unofficial, unpaid tech support guy in Bangalore. One would imagine Lego enthusiasts are driven by creativity. But Seemon insists he isn’t the creative sort. “I am very patient and I like to build,” he says. “There are days when I wake up in the morning, start building, and realise only in the evening that I need to eat.” The Lego Taj Mahal took him 30 hours to build. “That’s how Lego is. It is addictive,” says Seemon’s father, a civil engineer, and brothers (one is an architect and the other a software engineer) don’t share his passion. “My mother likes it. When she visits, she takes down a few of my sets and builds them up again.” Seemon is a Do It Yourself kind of a guy and that perhaps explains his obsession with all things miniature. He is also a model railway hobbyist; he lays miniature train tracks and builds elaborate stations and layouts around them. This demands fine scale modelling — requiring super-steady hands, keen eyes and a vivid imagination.
His house is actually two houses in one. Seemon bought adjacent apartments, demolished the intervening wall, and redesigned the space himself. From furniture to wiring to a fish tank on the balcony, he designed and built most of the interiors. “I am a bit of a carpenter, electrician, plumber, architect and builder,” he says. Lego isn’t exactly an inexpensive hobby. The smallest accessories box costs about Rs600-700 and a set of about 750 pieces would cost between Rs3,000 to Rs4,000. The largest set in India, a Star Wars set with about 4,000 pieces, costs about Rs39,000. Seemon won’t reveal how much he has spent on Lego because any figure would horrify his parents. But what makes him invest so much of himself — time, money and effort — into his hobbies? He struggles to answer. A childlike pleasure maybe, he says at first. “I remember dismantling a moped when I was about 16. I took apart the whole thing, and couldn’t put it back together. I wrote the entrance exam to study architecture but didn’t get through.
That surprised me as I was always interested in building structures.” His hobbies could be his way of getting back, perhaps. During the interview, he has begun to make a miniature chair. In his large hands, the chair isn’t even as big as the nail of his little finger. He holds it with a tweezer, sticks two legs to the sides and carefully waits for the glue to dry. A thought strikes him. “The thrill is in the process. At the end, yes there is a sense of accomplishment. But almost immediately, you are thinking of the next project.” You can use our E-Catalogue to choose from the wide variety ofThe Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site. Go to Amazon.in's Home PageHi, this is Manish from Corporate Cosmo. It's a Website Designing cUnited States of America Dallas / Fort Worth Jump inside the World's biggest box of LEGO® bricks! LEGOLAND® Discovery Centers bring together great 4D cinema shows, rides, LEGO MINILAND® and more. Join us for a great indoor family experience.