Meeting a Legend – An evening with Mr Lakshmana Rao of Guider Pens, Rajahmundry, AP, India

I got this pleasant opportunity to meet one of the legends of the hand-made fountain pens manufacturing in India…Mr G. Lakshmana Rao of Guider Pens, Rajahmundry. He had come to Hyderabad to visit his son and daughter and it was in his son’s house that we met. He had called me before coming to Hyderabad and said he’d be there for a few days and I was very pleased at his humility and jumped at the opportunity to meet him. We met on a pleasant evening on 29th April and he took me on a whirlwind tour of his experiences in this trade…which I think began in the 1960s. He has almost 50 years’ experience and expertise in making fountain pens and has seen the heydays of handmade FPs in India. An easygoing man with a great passion for fountain pens, Mr Lakshmana Rao is a fund of stories and I didn’t know how time flew by listening to his anecdotes. He had brought with him some of his recent creations, especially the really huge ‘Zimbo,’ and the really tiny 1 ½ inch ‘Mini.’ He had also brought samples of some really old pens… an old mandarin yellow Varsity pen that he is restructuring…a couple of old Sheaffer bodies…and many more…
Mr Lakshmana Rao with a Guider cream 7 blue acrylic pen…
  Some guider pens…old and new…some in need of repair…look at the variety…!
  Oh…such lovely colours, those acrylics, reds, and blues, and browns, and whites… the yellow one in the middle is the Varsity pen…

The Zimbo has a removable clip (Hari told me it is called an ‘Accommodation Clip’), which Lakshmana Rao told me is known as the ‘Khadar Clip’…I asked him why it is called so, and he told me that during the early days of independence in India, many people wore clothes made of handspun cotton cloth called ‘khadi’ (also known as ‘khaddar’) and fountain pens were the only pens that were being used and many people who used fountain pens actually had a narrow pocket stitched to their shirts especially to keep these clipless pens… and fixed the clip when they had wore shirts with normal pockets...a very interesting anecdote from the history of fountain pens in India…
  The long and the short of it…the 9 inch Zimbo and the 1 ½ inch Mini…( I am sorry, the picture is not sharp enough…)

At that time, he told me, raw material was available only in places like Mumbai (then Bombay) and Chennai (then Madras) and once there was some problem with the regular supply chain and they couldn’t get the raw material in time and his father didn’t want to leave the unit and go to Mumbai and sent Lakshmana Rao’s elder brother…not knowing the ways of the big city, the young man lost his money and came back without the task fulfilled…Lakshmana Rao candidly told me that he had just finished his intermediate and had become an unruly young man roaming the streets without any specific aim in his life…his father saw this and wanted to give him some direction and initiated Lakshmana Rao into this skill and business and the intrepid young man that he was, he one day told his father that he’d like to go to Mumbai and get the raw materials for their pen making unit…he told me that that his father was initially reluctant, but the business was suffering and someone had to get things done…and for the first time, the 19 year old Lakshmana Rao went to Mumbai to purchase stuff from Dalal and Co…it was a successful trip and the first in the many many trips that he’d undertake around the country to sell his pens, buy raw materials, etc.
  Some new Guider models…the Zimbo is reclining on the top…

Lakhsmana Rao tells me that his father was an unlettered man and was one of the first batch of workers that worked for Ratnam Pens, when the founder of Ratnam Pens was in charge…Lakshmana Rao told me that many workers then branched out and set up their different units…and the senior Ratnam helped many with finance and expertise later too…and thus was born Guider Pens… Though unlettered, Lakshmana Rao’s father had native intelligence and skilled in his work and worked with intuition…and he recounted how his father used to test gold nibs by throwing them against a wooden board and they should pierce the board to show toughness...he would throw ebonite pens on the floor to convince customers that these were tough pens...and if any customer brought back a gold nib with some complaint, he would make a new one without any extra charge and more importantly, he would personally break the old nib lest his workers succumbed to temptation and repaired it and re-sold it….such was his father’s integrity, he told me… He told me about those days when the demand for FPs was very huge and they did not have the resources to fulfill the demand...people used to come to Lakshmana Rao’s shop and ask him to give whatever was available...he'd say let me fix the nib and feeder...they'd say...don't worry about nib and feeder...give them to us...we'll fix them...those good old fountain pen days…!!!
  Lakshmana Rao again…with his beloved pens…

Lakshmana Rao recounted an incident where a High Court judge had personally come to his shop for a new pen…and there was this huge protocol business with assistants, attendants, police and so on…and he said the judge spoke to him informally and all hangers on were surprised…and the judge pulled out a fountain pen from his pocket and told Lakshmana Rao that his (the judge’s) father had brought him to this shop (when Lakshmana Rao’s father was in charge) and gifted him this pen when had passed his matriculation and it had stood the test all these years…this pen was getting old and he wanted a new pen…and asked Lakshmana Rao to make him a new pen…

As a gesture of his affection, Lakshmana Rao gave me two Asoka Pens, ebonite pens made in Tenali (now closed down), for my AP fountain pens collection…and a cap and a barrel of what he said was a very old Sheaffer model (this is another story…)

Many many stories he told me that evening…I hadn’t recorded the conversation, mainly because I wanted to savour the memories…and there are many more that I haven’t recorded here…I hadn’t forgotten to take my camera…though…