Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Ah, life

I had an epiphany this morning, as I sat at 7am outside my room, trying to blow soap bubbles.
James Herriot said of the veterinary profession, that it offers you innumerable opportunities of making a total chump of yourself. I found myself thinking of his words this morning as I watched a particularly large bubble pop.
Since I've come to college, I've done a huge number of things I never in my wildest dreams planned on doing. I've run barefoot around the deserted Open Air theater in IIT at 2am, behind a stray dog that had stolen my shoe. I've I've spent infinitely many arduous hours making 'cheat sheets' and constantly marveled on just how many words you can fit into a single A4 sheet, if you just write them small enough. I've acted in a play in which I mouthed the dialogue, "I'm dying, dammit! I'm dying!"
I have also walked barefoot along the entire length of the IIMA campus, while carrying a Veena, thanks to a broken sandal strap. I have driven a 20 year old, rickety kinetic honda at 60kmph in blinding rain, while pulling along a laughing foreigner on a cycle. I've fallen passionately in love with my bed, and for once, in this relationship, I'm the more communicative one. I've made one serious attempt to choreograph a classical-style shadow dance, to a piece of music that opens with heavy breathing that merges into hip-hop beats. The dance was thankfully never performed. Once a year, I wear ridiculous clothes and practice my 'come hither' look on a bunch of screaming girls, for the honor and glory of my wing. I've painted my face white and blacked out my eyes to look like a zombie for the department Halloween day celebrations, only to discover that I was the only person in costume in the entire class of 60.

Every ridiculous thing I do is chalked down on the slate of experience. At the very least, some of my friends did have a good laugh at my expense. So, I disagree with Herriot. It isn't only the veterinary profession that offers you infinite opportunities of making a fool of yourself- it's life itself.

PS: This post was actually begun on the day of filming of the InsIghT spoof video, in which we were doing a mock 'soap'box, which explains the bubbles.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

My gilded pen

Today in class, my trusty ballpoint pen ran out of ink. Since I greatly pride myself on the accuracy and speed of my note-taking, I hurriedly begged around for another and R handed me her fountain pen. Writing with it brought back a whole well of memories. Fountain pens have individual characters, something our modern day ballpoints and rollerballs and technotips sadly lack. In most fountain pens the ink doesn't flow unless you hold the pen just so, and each pen has its own 'just so'. Shake a temperamental fountain pen too violently and it'll leave angry blotches of ink all over your notes.

I remember that we were only ever allowed to write with pencil till the fourth standard in school. From fifth standard, we made the drastic switch to fountain pens. I couldn't wait for the first day of school to start, I had such a beauty of a pen. It was made of a heavy metal and was painted bright gold with engraved geometrical patterns. It had a smooth long golden nib and a cap that closed with a most satisfying click. But its crowning glory was a giant plastic diamond, perched cockily right at the top of the cap. when you unscrewed the bottom, there was a tiny little well into which I would fill indigo blue ink with a dropper. My handwriting never looked better than it did shaped from that gilded pen. All day during class, I would secretly practice different signatures on the back page of my textbook.

When I broke the nib of that pen on the fourth day of fifth standard, I had to bite my lips to stop from crying. Big girls of ten don't cry over fountain pens. Back at home that evening, a comforting mother promptly took me to the stationery store where under my critical gaze, the shopkeeper replaced the nib. But somehow, the pen never seemed the same again. It grew more and more temperamental, spewing unsightly blots of ink at the slightest shake and always scratching the paper when I wrote. Still, I bore it all patiently, so infatuated was I with the pen's appearance.

Then one day, a notebook was returned to me after checking and it didn't contain the usual 'neat' comment from my teacher. If you've ever been in fifth standard in Army School Jammu, you'll know how much that 'neat' meant to us schoolgirls. We would gloat over our notebooks and compare the number of 'neat's and 'good's that we got. Losing one because of a giant blue blot that percolated three pages deep was too much for my loyalty to that pen. So in it went to the deep recesses of my pencil box, while I moved on to the safer and ubiquitous Chinese pens that had tiny pert little nibs that coyly peeked out from a plastic body.

The pen stayed there for several years. The shiny gold paint got scratchy and then wore out, the diamond chipped. Once in a while in a fit of pity, or when all my other pens had run out of ink, I would give this one another try. But it would always hold out for a sentence or so, before starting to scratch paper again.

As I grew up, I turned more impatient. I no longer had time to patiently refill ink in pens every evening, or keep experimenting with a fountain pen till I found its sweet spot. I discovered roller balls and gel pens, which would smoothly release ideal amounts of ink while displaying no personality at all. My relationship with my pens became more and more impersonal. Pens no longer have characters, they're just instruments that you take notes with. But today, holding R's fountain pen in my hand and coaxing rows of neat sentences out of it, it all came back.