Ink Pens

 I was watching an Indian film from the 1980s this evening, when I saw an ink bottle in a scene. Suddenly, memories from my school days came flooding back. I can't remember in which grade we graduated from pencils to ink pens, but it must have been grades 4 or 5. Ink pens, mind you, because using ball pens was specifically banned. Something about them spoiling handwriting, in the days when good handwriting still counted for something. My handwriting was pretty bad because I had been taught to write in cursive hand in my first school. Cursive hand makes good handwriting seem more elegant and makes bad hand writing even more ugly. After several years of being castigated by my teachers and mocked by my friends, I shifted to block handwriting. Making boring block hand seem ugly requires a level of talent that even I didn't have. But coming back to the subject of pens. I remember ball pens were banned but something known as pilot pens were not. I couldn't tell the difference between them since neither used free-flowing ink. Among ink pens, we had a variety of types to choose from. There were the old-fashioned ink pens which had to be filled with a dropper. Then there were more advanced pens which had an inbuilt mechanism to suck ink in when pressed. And then, there were the fancier "China" pens which had nibs that looked like the snout of a seal. INk pens are messy, and it was not unusual to see kids with huge splotches of ink on their clothes. But, the best part of using ink pens was the smell of ink on paper. Ink has a strong smell but not as sharp as turpentine. Odourless ball point pens are much less messier but have no atmosphere. I don't remember if the ban on ballpoint pens lasted through my school years, but I can't remember the last time I saw an ink pen. My nephews have possibly never seen one and I doubt kids these days write much by hand.