A part and parcel of our childhood memories, an ubiquitous paraphernalia of our early student life was 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 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, making it workable. Sometimes widening the nib with an used Topaz razor blade also did the trick.
Topaz blade serves multiple purposes. Once in my first job I met a guy from Barhampur, Odisha who came for an interview. Staring at his stained teeth due to over consumption of PAAN (Betel leaves with scented tobacco) I asked him - "Don't you think you need to clean your teeth before your interview" ?. He snarled his brown teeth at me - "AJI RAATI EKA TOOPAAZA (Topaz) BLADE NEI DAANTA KURRIBARRA EKKA (Tonight using Topaz blade I will extract all the stains out of my teeth).
The iconic movie 3 IDIOTS pokes fun at our education system - our tendency to prefer complex solutions over simple ones, deliberate obfuscation versus common sense. At beginning of movie the Director of the Engineering College boasts in front of his students showing a pen he designed to work in space, where there is no gravitational pull to pull the ink downwards. The pragmatic yet playful Rancho played by Aamir Khan retorts back with a simpler solution - "Why don't they use pencils in space" ? As they say in Hindi "BADI BADI KHUSIYA HEY CHHOTI CHHOTI BATON MEIN" (Big happiness lies in small talks). The audience instantly burst into laughing after Rancho's impromptu response.
Back to fountain pen, its ink had many multipurpose usages - especially in our school aptly named as Demonstration Multipurpose (DM), a school with a high visibility in Bhubaneswar those days. One fine morning we boys decided to demonstrate the multipurpose utility of our fountain pens. Someone came up with this brilliant, creative idea of using the pen to bring out more playful joy and do justice to its potential of other than using it for writing. Play HOLI with the fountain pen.
He wetted and painted the back of the front benchers by surreptitiously slashing some blue ink from behind. The front benchers did 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 sports teacher, Hannan Sir spotted us spotted leopards and tried his best to get to the bottom to 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 all of us by forcing us into a tiring run around a field, along the edges of Eucalyptus trees. The Holi celebratio written in ink had an unholy ending as 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. Have a Happy and Colorful Holy-day sans ink. Take care and stay safe.
In the backdrop of the digital Revolution, i don't know if anybody is still very comfortable with the ubiquitous pen the pen that we were so used to till the end of the lady century. Nevertheless the post does bring up the sweet memories of widespread use (or misuse) of pen during our school days.
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