The joy of writing with a fountain pen
We all should start writing with fountain pens again
Do you remember the first time you came in contact with a fountain pen?
For me, it was when I was in my school. I was in the third standard when my brother who was elder to me by three years went to the sixth standard. He got his first ink pen/fountain pen as instructed by our schools. He was moving away from the humble graphite pencil to a more sophisticated tool for writing. The new ink bottles and filling up ink without spilling looked really cool that I couldn’t wait before I could use them too.
When I came to the sixth standard, I bought my first ink pen and threw away my pencil having gotten tired of sharpening it a million times a day and dropping it right after.
My first pen was a beautiful white Hero pen with a sketch of a Chinese plum blossom.
It felt like a gift for getting older and as if I was entering the realms of coolness by possessing a fountain pen. Its shiny new ink and the finesse it gave for our handwriting due to the slight heaviness and a smooth flow was incredibly gratifying. Ink bottles and ink fillers took up space in our classroom desks along with chalk pieces and ink erasers that would scrub off the paper rather than the ink on it.
Lending ink became a symbol of friendship, spraying ink without the other knowing became one of our pranks, spraying ink at the end of the academic year was a show of love to our friends whom we will miss, showing off a golden nib was a representation of our status, angling the nib in a certain way to avoid blotches became our second nature, dropping our perfectly working pen and bending the nib became a thing of nightmares, our hands getting dirty with ink by holding close to the nib became a proof of our hard work, spraying ink between papers and identifying the animal it formed became an indication on what animal we were born as in our previous lives.
Even though a Parker pen was ten times costlier, we would still use our modest Hero pens for we had raised them to a status as our symbol of luck in letting us pass our exams in the past.
Within a few years, we lost the reverence we had for it and Sachin Tendulkar coming in ads to sell the Gel pens which won’t spoil even if it’s drenched in water stole our attention from the simple beauty of the fountain pens. We can just throw away the plastic pens once we are done and we don’t have to deal with the hassle of filling ink and spilling it everywhere except where it’s supposed to be.
Whether we liked it or not, we became adults soon, to participate in a race that was laid out for us with little or no time to revel in the past and got accustomed to the ordinary use and throw ballpoint pens.
After several years, I came in contact with the fountain pen again through one of my colleagues. I borrowed it for a few moments and wrote a few sentences with it. I fell head over heels again on how amazing it was to write in it. I kept seeing those sentences I wrote all through the day because of how alluring my handwriting looked. With my newfound appreciation, I bought a beautiful fountain pen with a solid metal casing for myself and have been writing with it ever since. It felt like I borrowed a part of my childhood with every stroke of the ink and a part of antiquity while doing so. I also felt happy that I was somehow reducing the plastic waste considerably as it’s reusable.
As someone who writes a lot, I felt like I was respecting my writing by giving it an elegant fountain pen rather than a plastic pen that I can throw away as soon as its use was over. I became more mindful when I’m writing, for it has a reassuring presence like that of an old friend’s comfort. This time around, the spilt ink or the dirtied hands didn’t bother me. I loved the time I spent filling it up from the ink bottle for it felt like I was taking a pause in the never-ending race that has engulfed as adults and writing with it has become a sort of a respite in itself.
The next time you are in your home, clean your shelves, dust those boxes and if you are fortunate, you might find your lucky fountain pens long forgotten and stacked somewhere. Borrow an ink bottle from your younger siblings or cousins or take a trip to that corner stationery shop and write a few words with it and revel a few moments in its unpretentious beauty.
PS : Aren’t those ink erasers the biggest lies of our generation? They tore the pages that the ink was in rather than the ink itself.
PPS : And spilling ink between two pages to identify the image is used in the psychology called Rorschach inkblot test.
