Pleasure of writing

When I was in school, my teachers, senior students, parents used to extol the virtues of using an fountain pen or as we used to call it, an ink pen. Initially, I never used to like it as it was messy, difficult to refill and took time to set and become smooth.

However as I grew up and started writing more and more, I started understanding the benefits of using a fountain pen over the more "convenient" roller ball pen or ball pen. I really used to look forward for an opportunity to use my fountain pen, be it for studying (ick!), writing journals (double ick!!) or writing letters (Yes, really those were the days before the internet, email and cheap phone calls).

In today's fast paced life, the focus is on convenience at the expense of value and even pleasure. Ball pens are a excellent convenience items but somehow I don't get the same pleasure to write using a ball pen. I look at it as just doing a function. Nowadays, since moving out of school and working in the high tech world of IT and technology, the opportunities to write are very rare and are mostly restricted to writing cheques (checks), an occasional shopping list and sometimes jot down notes in meetings.

I feel that if I decide to write using a pen and paper, it will mean a dedicated effort by setting aside time, organizing my thoughts and then putting them down on paper which may again improve the quality of the output.

Buying a fountain pen also in today's world in the US at least has become an expensive proposition with the prices well beyond the means of a common man. I checked prices of pens on some websites and the prices were from a few tens of dollars to thousands of dollars. Compare to ball pens which are available almost dime a dozen and the fountain pen definitely becomes impractical for all purposes. 

Recently my wife made a trip back home to India. The first thing I asked her to bring back for me was a fountain pen. Now I am a proud owner of a Parker fountain pen.

Add to it, the overhead of refilling the ink or replacing the cartridge more frequently than a ball point refill, nib and pen care and maintenance etc. and it is even less attractive. I remember, in school the pen cleaning used to be a weekly activity on Sunday mornings. Disassemble the pen, flush out the ink, remove the nib from the feed and then soak it in warm water, clean it and then assemble it back again.

With all the disadvantages of the fountain pens as compared to the ball pens, the most important advantage that, in my opinion overcomes everything else is that it lends a certain grace to your writing when you using a fountain pen. You handwriting automatically looks good and of course using a fountain pen looks very classy. After a long time, I am encouraged to write something on paper, but get discouraged by the fact that maintaining the paper diary / notebook is again an unnecessary overhead in today's digital world. Publishing those thoughts would again entail digitizing them (like this) and is it really worth the effort?

But again when I think about it, I feel that if I decide to write using a pen and paper, it will mean a dedicated effort by setting aside time, organizing my thoughts and then putting them down on paper which may again improve the quality of the output.

Maybe I will make a conscious effort to do that after all....