Why I Bought a Fountain Pen?
I opened the packet and held the Parker Fountain Pen in my hand. It felt good.
60 years must have passed since I graduated to use ‘paper and fountain pen’ in school. School life started with ‘slate and slate-pencil’, soon graduating to ‘paper and pencil’ and then to ‘paper and steel-pen’ and finally to ‘paper and fountain pen’. Each graduation was a proud moment in life.
‘Slate & slate pencil’ is how it all started. Cheap slate pencils, which we used daily, would write with minimum contrast on a slate. Special white-slate pencils that wrote with clear contrast were costlier and hence reserved for use only during examinations.
It was a proud moment to graduate to paper and pencil. That era had its challenges and left a permanent mark (or scar) in life! Razor blades (discarded as blunt after use in shaving by adults) were used to sharpen pencils. Pencil sharpeners, which every pencil using kid owns now, were a rarity and beyond affordable price range then. During the early pencil days, my elder brother would sharpen my pencil for me. Once, when I thought it was sharp enough, he thought it was not. He took a decisive swipe to remove a slice of wood, and his blade-wielding hand extended beyond the pencil to where I had extended mine to indicate ‘enough’. A one-inch scar at the foot of my middle finger (that became my identification mark for life) was a gift from the pencil days. Kids could not carry blades to school. So, we would start with 0.3 mm line thickness in the morning and end up with 1 mm lines in the evening. It was worse if one forgot to sharpen the pencil before leaving home in the morning or broke the pencil tip halfway through the day. Most of us kept previously used pencils (less than 2 inches in length that are difficult to grip) as standby for such eventualities.
Then came paper and steel-pen (a.k.a. dip-pen) era. A writing instrument that was a minor improvement over a quill. It had a wooden stalk onto which a metal nib was attached. A bottle of ink had to be at hand always. For each dip into the bottle, the nib would hold a tiny amount of ink. Any violent jerk of the hand would result in deposition of a blob of ink on the paper. One had to be ready with a piece of cardboard (blotting paper) to quickly and artfully remove the blob of ink without spreading it. The bottle of ink had to be open and placed by the side of the paper always! A toppled ink bottle was a nightmare! Special spill-proof ink-pots were available but were beyond the reach of most kids!
I entered High School in 1960 and got my first fountain pen. The shop had on display attractive fountain pens with golden caps (Chinese Hero make). But there was this silent, zero-body language signal from my dad that used to inform us when something was out of our reach. The single colour, ordinary looking, the fountain pen was nevertheless a proud possession for me. It helped me do away with the ink-bottle and the blotting paper. But soon the fountain pen started bleeding at its neck, leaving my fingers and even pockets blue! Each time after filling ink (special filler was used to pick ink from a bottle and feed it into the body of the pen) I would drop candle wax around the seam of the pen to smother the leak. I coasted through early high school days thus! Soon hero pens made their way into my life. They were leak-free and had fillers as part of the pen. Writing had finally become hassle-free!
That is when it happened! Mr Raghavan was our neighbour, a stern, never smiling Customs Officer. He beckoned me one evening and handed over what looked like a pen! Back home we inspected it. One push on its head and a writing tip popped out of the other end. Another push on its head and the writing tip withdrew inside! Wonder-of-wonders! Side of the pen carried the logo and name of a cargo ship of USA. Questions like; Should I carry it to school? What if it is lost? haunted us. Before the questions were answered the pen stopped writing; the ink inside was over. Mr Raghavan was informed but was helpless to secure refills.
Years passed before the Indian markets started selling ball-point pens! Fountain pens slowly made way for a range of new pen avatars! If I saw a pen that I liked because of its shape or colour or any other feature I could buy it without batting an eyelid! The new pen would replace the older one till yet another pen held my fancy. Gone were the days when one would buy a pen that would last one's lifetime. 40 years passed thus!
My first awakening happened in 2005. A colleague of mine was retiring from IIT Bombay service. He called me to his room and opened a box (the size of a large shoebox). It was filled with pens. A collection that resulted from pens dished out at conferences & meetings that he had attended. Most of the pens were unused and were not writing. I realized that the same fate awaited me when I would retire a decade later. My decision not to pick up pens at conferences and meetings was made on that day.
My second awakening happened in October 2016 when Times of India carried a news item, “Biennale installation to be made from plastic pens”. The article contained interesting and scary statistics “For this initiative, 9,325 plastic pens were collected from a school of 2,000 students over a period of three months. . . ”. That was an astonishing pen discard rate - 1.6 pens per student per month (=9,325/2000/3). But not all pen discards from that school would have gone into the collection suggesting a higher pen discard rate. The article also says, “When the campus of National Higher Secondary School, Vattoli, was cleaned recently by the education department, they found 65 kg of plastic pens. The life of a plastic pen is less than a week. People have lost the habit of changing the refill as pens are available for just Rs 2. In a school, with a strength of 1,000, at least 2,000 plastic pens are used and thrown away every week”. That puts the pen discard rate from school children at an alarming 2 pens per student per week or 8 pens per student per month! Let us accept a pen discard rate value of 4 pens per school child per month.
As per data of Kerala State Government, the number of children in Higher Secondary & High School in Kerala is 20,63,190 (this number is arrived at by assuming that Plus-1 will have an equal number of students as in Plus-2). If upper primary school children also use pens then the total will be 34,20,475. That is a whopping 136 lakhs (13.6 million) plastic pens discarded in a month only by school children of Kerala (=34,20,475*4). I shudder to make an estimate of pen discard rates by other user segments in Kerala. And remember that Kerala contributes only 2.8 % to the population of India. And world population is . . . .! {I am adding this note in August 2017: My personal data collection has confirmed a discard rate of 8 pens per school kid per month. That raises the pen discard rate by school kids of Kerala to 27 million, ie. 2.7 crores per month}
My third and final awakening happened in January 2017. A popular magazine The Week (January 22, 2017 issue) carried an article “Perfect Pen Drive”. It spoke of a move by the State Government of Kerala to replace ball-point pens by fountain pens. Message from the State education Minister referred to the move as more than mere replacing ballpoint pens. He saw the move, at a deeper level, as a fight against the use-and-throw culture. That message justified the sub-title of the article “Replacing the ball-point pens with fountain pens has environmental, cultural, social benefits”.
The picture of Lakshmi Menon, installation artist, who had put up the pen installation at Kochi-Muziris Biennale seated next to a pile of pens that went into the installation made a deep impression on me.
A boxed item that explained why plastic pen discards pose a serious threat enhanced by GK.
My mind was made up. I waited for the ballpoint pens already in my holding to dry out. Last week I ordered a Fountain Pen — Parker Frontier Matte Black. Blue Dart packet finally reached me. In a hurry and in anticipation I opened the packet. The Parker Pen with my name engraved on it was in my hand.
It felt good to think that I was contributing my bit to conservation.
Prof Arya was seated by my side. He nudged me back to the realities of this polluting world. The plastic material that was used to pack just one pen lay in front of us in a huge heap! Large plastic mailing bag, bubble wraps, plastic pouch, square plastic sheets were all there; and in numbers and in size and in quantity much more than anyone will feel were necessary. (Amazon.in to kindly take note). “How many plastic pen equivalents do you think this will be?” asked Arya. I was speechless.
