A part and parcel of our childhood memories, and an ubiquitous paraphernalia of our early student life - the Fountain Pen. The first modern fountain pen was invented by an American, Lewis Waterman from New York, which revolutionized writing by making it less arduous.
Before that there was no plausible way for a continuous, capillary flow of ink. Many great writers had to contend with the pain of penning down their thought in staggered manner, going through the tedious loop, the monotony of dipping the pen tip time and again inside the ink bowl to write.
Our teachers carried multiple fountain pens inside their bulging shirt pockets. It was not unusual to see leaking pens spilling and blotting their shirts, causing embarrassments and occasionally spilling some beans. The SULEKHA was the most popular brand of ink and Royal Blue being the more often used color. The red ink was sparingly used, only for markings and notations by the examiners.
One had to be very careful while pouring ink after unscrewing the fountain pen, taking care not to spill it, lest it spoils your shirt and surrounding. During the hot weather or due to fewer usage, the nib of the pen would dry out. Shaking it off and letting the Newton's law of gravitation do the rest, would make it workable. Sometimes widening the nib with an used Topaz razor blade also did the trick.
The ink of fountain pen had many multipurpose usages - especially in our school aptly named as Demonstration Multipurpose (DM), a school with a high visibility in Bhubaneswar. One fine morning we boys decided to demonstrate the multipurpose utility of fountain pen, as someone came up with this creative idea of using the pen to bring out more playful joy and do justice to its potential, other than using it for writing only.
He wetted and painted his front bencher's back by surreptitiously throwing some visibly apparent blue ink from behind. The front bencher did the same, by replicating it and passing the buck to the guy ahead of him. By afternoon, most of the guys looked colorful, their starched white shirts now converted to blue and black, polka dotted Hawaiians. Our martinet teacher, Hannan Sir spotted the spotted leopards and tried his best to get to the bottom and dig out the culprit who started it.
Like "NIRMULI LATA" or rootless creeper, which curls it's way from plant to plant, making it is very difficult to trace its roots, his curiosity to trace the source was futile. In spite of his best efforts, he could not get to the root of the matter. Frustrated, he punished us by forcing on us a tiring run around a field, along the edges of Eucalyptus trees. The ink Holi had an unholy ending, no one ever dared to play this game again.
Towards the end of the 1980s the Fountain Pen started dying a slow, natural death, unable to compete with ball point pens which slowly took over. The Reynolds brand, unique of its kind and only available in Bhubaneswar those days were so popular that I used to get big orders and acted as a mule, carrying bagfuls of them to my eagerly waiting Engineering College friends in Rourkela.
Have you observed that no matter what, when you use some one's pen it has certain inertia associated with it. For a few more minutes it is not unusual for one to get this ghostly feeling of possessed by the last owner, as your handwriting tends to take the shape of the previous user of the pen. It had made me wonder how come my handwriting suddenly got better.
Now writing with a fountain pen is going to be of mountainous proportion, a real pain. Only left are nostalgic memories to cherish, which is going to die with our generation, as photo films, telegram and handwritten letters did.
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