I still love my Parker Frontier

Last week I sat at a press event and was busy writing probable questions with my Parker Frontier fountain pen in my black Moleskine notebook when a twenty-something YouTuber whispered in my right ear, ‘Is that an ink pen?’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said and looked up towards him. He said nothing but his expression was one that had ‘this guy is insane’ stamped all over.

I realized then how strange it must have seemed to him to find someone actually using a fountain pen. Almost everyone there was clicking pictures of facts and figures that were projected on the screen as this seemed so much easier and simpler. ‘Is the #inkpen dead?’ I thought and remembered my school and college days when I made sure that I wrote my exam papers with the pen that I used to write my notes with because I believed that pens remembered everything they wrote and guided the hand even as the brain was busy sifting loads of information.

Fountain pens in this age of technology?

By the way, I still have that Hero pen with its hooded nib, now broken and needing a replacement, that Specky gave me as a gift after marriage. My first expensive fountain pen was a Parker Frontier that we bought from a Parker exclusive store in York after spending nearly an hour there convincing ourselves that this was more important than anything else. That pen with its black titanium medium nib still accompanies me and is more precious than even my Surface Pro4 or any of the numerous smartphones that I use.

Yes, it is easier to make notes faster with apps like WriterP or OneNote and a stylus glides speedily over responsive smartphone screens to swype texts at the speed of my thoughts. We have reached a stage when apps like Speechnotes converts speech into text in both English as well as Hindi and Otter transcribes long recorded interviews into text faster than it would take me to listen and then write. And yet, I love my Parker Frontier knowing that it is no longer expensive enough to create a buzz when a lot of others are flaunting their Montblancs, Watermans, and Sheaffers.

Every time I open my fountain pen I remember my perpetually ink-stained thumb, middle and index fingers during my school days. This was because pens then could leak… this was probably because those with cartridges and self-filling reservoirs were expensive and not to be bought for kids though I must admit that I did have a huge cache of pens then. Pens with fat and thin bodies, transparent as well as fancifully coloured tanks, clips that had strange moulded designs, and a few with a piston jutting out from one end. It was then mandatory for us to use an ink pen as everyone believed that ballpoint pens, gel pens, and those with fibre tips did no good to one’s handwriting.

The blow art specialist

If you think pens were used only to write on notebooks you’re way off the mark. I remember my mother once wondering why I refilled my pen every day because ‘all you’ve written is half a page,’ she asked. I never told her that I was the blow-artist of my class. Now if you’re wondering what a blow-artist was then, you’ve probably never held your pen in front of your mouth with the nib facing a wall and then blown little unruly droplets of ink to create bizarre designs. Of course, some of us who found art intimidating did botched-up jobs on the back of the shirt of the one standing in front during assembly. I once used three pens with red, blue, and black ink to draw a somewhat warped image of a girl on the wall just above the bin in our class during the lunch break. Our class teacher noticed this and asked sternly, ‘Who has done this?’

Silence. No one said a word.

The teacher then slowly walked through one row to the other until she reached me and said, ‘You’re the one. I know you have done this.’

I was completely taken aback. ‘This teacher has magical powers,’ I thought and said in a low voice, ‘I did it.’ And then seconds later I added, ‘But how did you know this, Miss?’

She smiled and pointed to my stained lips but asked, ‘How is this done? I must ask our art teacher to ask you to do a few sheets for the annual day.’

Well, that was one day when I taught this maverick art to my teacher and got away with my disruptive act of having vandalized the class wall.

#inkpen

Fountain pens haven’t faded away despite the fact that most of us are using technology to do our writing. The other day I read that the sale of fountain pens has gone up on Amazon. The stationery shops still stock inks and ink pens. However, I see hardly anyone using pens. Graham Greene once wrote: ‘My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.’ Things have changed a lot, Mr Greene and most of us now punch their thoughts on a keyboard or just finger ideas to pop up on smartphone screens. So far as filling forms on a plane is concerned, even the best ink pen might spurt some ink in a pressurized cabin. Despite all this if you are still the sort who recollects Edward Lytton Wheeler’s words about the pen being mightier than the sword, you’d be a part of that small contingent who actually uses a fountain pen.

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Arvind Passey
12 July 2019