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:
Interesting read.
ReplyDeleteReadingg the post was quite a nostalgic moment :)
ReplyDeleteReminded me of the moments when I got a ball pen in my 8th grade as gift from my uncle... Nostalgic... Now-a-days we use pen only for signature that too very rarely
ReplyDelete