Asha Iyer Kumar :
The other day, I received a Mont Blanc pen as a gift. Considering its brand value, and the fact that I am a writer, it should make a great present. But it is not, because the second point, that of me being a ‘writer’ is highly dubious. I write, yet I don’t, at least not in the manner of ‘writing’ with pen on paper.
Seen in that light, I am only an occasional pen-pusher and the once pleasurable act of watching an assortment of thoughts squiggle down the white paper tract has now become a rare occurrence. The pen has been upstaged by other modern methods of documentation. Yet, when people ask me what I do, I at once say that I ‘write.’ What a humongous distortion of truth that is!
Typically, a writer conjures up a cinematic image of a pensive, solitary human at a desk wanly lit by a table lamp, spending a chunk of his time staring at the wall, tapping some part of his face with the rear end of the pen. A basket beside him with balls of crushed paper sheets scattered around it completes the picture of a classic wordsmith. While the vintage image still retains its romantic charm, the significance of the pen as an implement to register thought is steadily on the wane.
The most important uses that I now have for the ink are to write cheques, sign bills or to fill the immigration form. A majority of people don’t feel the need to carry a pen with them these days because either someone else would have it in emergency, or it would be found dangling in places where it is essential. The pen hasn’t become completely alien to us yet, but it has probably stopped being an inevitable part of our adult lives. It is no more a prized possession it once was.
It was with the arrival of the home PC in the year 2000 that my association with the writing implement began to dilute and my dependence on it began to decline. Till then, it was the conduit between what my mind suggested and what my eyes eventually saw of it on the surface of the paper. It was the tool that realised my inner most emotions in concrete, comprehensible form. It was what gave me my early distinctions in academics, and made me intimate with the creative craft that I was eager to pursue.
I remember the old, lazy afternoons in the backyard of my house, fanned by palm trees, I indulged in the brain-racking act of scrawling down and scratching out ideas that I would later get typed on paper before either mailing it to a magazine editor or stacking in my box file to idle. There is an inexplicable magic in converting lucid contemplation to tangible words. Way back then, I didn’t type and delete. I wrote and struck out. I didn’t ‘save’ what I wrote; I ‘preserved’ it. The ink was a veritable testimony to my fledgling intellect. Today, whatever my creative mind churns out, I store in a virtual unit. And I live under the constant threat of a total obliteration of my creative produce following an abrupt system failure.
My bond with the pen might have weakened with time, but I still cherish it immensely. I realise its innocent worth when I scramble around to note a number in the midst of a call or when a friend, to who I presented a pen recently, said that it was the best gift he could receive or when I still occasionally sit by the creek and ‘pen’ a poem.
The Mont Blanc may not be of much use to me, but I will keep it, because, not all things in life need to be utilitarian.
And I will still call myself a writer, because to say I am a ‘typist’ will be utterly bizarre.
(Asha Iyer Kumar is a freelance journalist based in Dubai)
