Once movie stars headed to exotic locations for some sun and sand in between movies, but young Bollywood has a different concept of fun, and that could involve learning welding in New York.

Bipasha Basu just announced she was taking a month off to learn belly-dancing, but an actor who is into his newfound hobby is Abhay Deol. Without being distracted by the fame that followed Dev.D, Deol is melting metal at 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit in New York. He has gone for an advanced course in welding and metal work. Apparently, the three-month course, which he attended early this year even as Dev.D was premiering in India, was just not enough.

For Shreyas Talpade, photography began as a pastime in Rajasthan while shooting for Dor. Now, it is a serious hobby. “I have come a long way from my Dor days when it comes to understanding technicalities like aperture, shutter speed, lighting and so on,” says Talpade, who recently turned on the shutters on his co-stars from Hook Ya Crook while shooting in Hyderabad.

Similarly, thrilled with their swimming-with-the-white-sharks experience in the Bahamas for Blue, Akshay Kumar, Sanjay Dutt and Zayed Khan kept at it even when the director announced pack-up. So much so that the trio’s names are up at the local beach’s Hall of Fame alongside the likes of Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan and Johnny Depp.

The latest member of this get-more-out-of-life club is Rock On!! star Purab Kohli. A trained deep-sea diver, he is just back in the city after visiting the white sharks of South Africa. Recalling his experience, he says, “The authorities put out a bait of flesh and blood, and before we knew it, I was surrounded by these gigantic, 15-ft-long creatures. Soon, one of the sharks was barely 12 inches away from me. When she bit into that piece of meat, I could see her saw-like teeth in close-up.”