Pen and Evolution

The fountain pen became history for me long ago. It’s more correct to say that it has become prehistoric since I can’t even recall when I abandoned it and adopted the handy ballpoint pen. The fountain pen was a mess. You had to fill it with ink every morning before going to school, a task which required much patience and an equal dose of expertise too. You couldn’t be sure when the pen would catch a cold and start leaking and dye your fingers and shirt pocket in blue.

The ball pen, as it was called, descended from heaven as a miracle some time when I was in high school. My first ball pen was one of the many sent from America by a friend of my father, a gift that came as a parcel. Though it was American by origin, it didn’t write quite smoothly; it had a rather too big tip, a rotating ball.

The best ball pen I ever used in my student days was Red Leaf.  At Rs10, it was quite expensive in those days for a student. But its refills were available for Rs3. Today my students use ball pens costing Rs3. They are use-and-throw pens because the refill can’t be changed. Moreover, todays Rs3 is a tiny sum compared to the three rupees of the early 80s.

As the last academic session drew to a close, a student gifted Maggie with a pack of 20 pens of the three-rupee kind. All red pens. I joked that perhaps the student was hinting at the teacher’s inexorable fondness for leaving red marks in the answer sheets of students. I shared those pens anyway and found them as good as the Red Leaf of old days.

Occasionally I receive high-end pens as gifts. I don’t like them, however, because they tend to be too heavy and rather unwieldy. So I give them as presents to students who do something exceptional in the class. I continue to use the simple five-rupee pen.

The truth is that I don’t use the pen much these days. I use red pens more frequently since that’s part of my profession. I use the laptop for all my writing purposes and the phone for all the reminders and jottings. The pen has undergone such an evolution in my life that it is on the verge of extinction.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 282: