Ink Pen

Ink Pen and handwriting

During my farewell from college to join the current job, a ‘Parker’ ink pen was one of the parting gifts amongst many others by my friends. For about half a decade, the gift was lying idle, until recently. I accidently got hold of the pen while I was searching for something else.

I forgot what I was searching for and started to unpack the pen. The ink refill that came along with it had dried up. I had to wait until next day to use the pen after purchasing fresh ink refills.

I felt so nostalgic. The memories of my farewell party in college as well as the ink pen I used to use during school days simultaneously swayed through my mind.

The moment I started using the ink pen, I got back that cursive style, formal handwriting which I had in school. It was lost after I left school. I was absolutely fascinated by this.

After class 10 in school I had switched to ‘ball-point’ pen or ‘gel’ pen. Since then, I noticed an abrupt change in the quality of my handwriting. Gradually, my handwriting became more casual and abstract. Slowly, my usage of ink pen saw a steep decline and ball point pen, gel pens took over because of their convenience of use.
Back then in school, we mostly used ‘Wing Sung’ fountain pen and ‘Chelpark’ ink (Royal Blue).

Wing sung came in different colour variants. Black, Maroon and Bottle Green are some of the colours I remember, and owning more than one of these was like a privilege. There were other cheap local varieties of ink pens. I have used them too. Those pens often leaked ink and gave inky fingers.
During my school days, when I used to write my class notes with ink pen, the handwriting was neat and crisp. The uni-directional pen-nib restricted casual jotting down of words resulting in a cursive way of writing. One of my most coveted moments during school days was when the class teacher praised my handwriting. It gave me immense pleasure, equal or better than scoring the highest marks in class (which I never got, barring once or twice in class/weekly tests).

I got a brief virtual tour in my memory about my school days. Now a days almost all official works have gone digital, but whatever little usage of pen and paper is left, for that I am using that pen mostly for signing letters and other documents. I found that writing with a fountain pen is relaxing and a great way to de-stress and also increases patience. I would highly recommend usage of ink pen to all who likes to write. Just give it a try. It is really soothing.

Some fun facts associated with ink pen(for me):
• It was a potential weapon for mass destruction at school. On the eve of Holi or on the last day of the school session,while returning from school in the school bus, the humble ink played a very big role. All our shirts, hands and faces would be splattered with ink spots.

Even our teeth got stained during these ink wars. When we reached home, mom used to give that blank awestruck look. She would not scold us, rather quite sportingly shared our joy and that and was very sweet of her. She used to discard that particular shirt in the store and shortly we got our new uniform. Later after school while cleaning up the store room once during college days, once I saw a shirt from class 9. All thanks to mom.
• A very good collection of pens/other stationeries was kind of a subtle status symbol in school.
• The ink paper blot figures were quite fascinating and we always used to see images of ghosts with open arms in them.

• On the last of School in the 10th standard, our whole class got expelled for the day when some of our classmates unleashed their craziness with the ink pen from the morning itself. That day, after we were thrown out of the school, most of us watched a movie in a nearby theatre and had a gala time with no repentance whatsoever!