There are some things that I am not confident of writing about, though they are very close to me, almost like vital parts of whatever is my intellectual make up... though I have written two posts on Amitav Ghosh, these are mostly external to his works...I enjoy Amitav-da's novels tremendously and derive great joy and satisfaction after reading them...I have my favourites and at present they are In an Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome, and Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma...and Sea of Poppies will soon join this list...there are various reasons why these books have become my favourites...I have read his other novels and liked them and enjoyed them immensely...there is this reverence that I have for Amitav-da as a writer, which I slowly discovered growing in me over the past 10 years...I don't know why...He is great story teller...no doubt about it...and even before I had seen him for the first time and heard him speak, I somehow felt that Amitav-da was a very soft-spoken person and a powerful and dedicated writer...his writings has a very different quality...and, even though at some point of time I felt that I should maybe write a paper on one of his novels, I could not bring myself to even start work on this little project... therefore, meeting him and hearing him talk was a big experience for me... especially this time, I wouldn't have made it if my cousin Shubha (Chennai) hadn't come forward to help Shruti, when Shruti was frantically hunting for passes... I feel happy when my family and friends indulge me, but it is also a tremendous feeling of responsibility...
I can share my reading experiences of Amitav Ghosh's novels with you, I can talk about his novels...things that I liked... but I will never be able to write about his novels...maybe I am a mad fan ... but, as long as there is a method...I am ok with it...
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
An evening with Amitav Ghosh
Hi...
Yesterday, June 24,2008, was a wonderful day...I met or rather saw my literary idol Amitav Ghosh...heard him speak and read out from his latest novel Sea of Poppies... this was the second straight time that I was attending a 'reading' by Amitav-da... the first time I heard and saw him was when he had come to Hyderabad for the launch of The Hungry Tide...I must thank Shruti profusely for running around and trying and succeeding to arrange an invite for the event...She was really furious at me for making her run around, when Vinod told us that invitations are not required as the organisers had announced the event and venue in the papers...and that he just walked in...
I don't have to tell that I was very happy...and even mustered enough courage to stand up and make an observation about the bhojpuri songs that Amitav-da had included in his novel...and also about my experience of reading the novel with the missing pages...I also videographed a small portion where Amitav-da is reading from Sea of Poppies...I will treasure this video...
I must thank Shruti, without whose efforts and support, I would not have made it to the reading yesterday evening...she also patiently took photographs when I went up to Amitav-da to get my copy of the novel autographed...
Thanks to ITC Hotels Kakatiya for arranging this beautiful book-reading evening in the sparkling Hyder Mahal hall and thanks to Penguin for bringing out a good looking book and for their excellent production values...
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Going totally bonkers...A Fountain Pen Dream!
It was absolutely crazy and bizarre… it was Saturday, 19th July, the college was closed due to a bandh called by a political party (we work 6 days a week)…I was at home…though Shruti works only 5 days a week, she had some work at EFLU…I completed some pending jobs in the morning and finished my lunch…I thought I’d take a nap…I had fallen asleep and sometime after that the power would have gone off, as it usually does these days in Hyderabad…I must have been really tired not to have woken up immediately, because the minute the ceiling fan stops moving, I start sweating immediately…it must have been after the power cut that I had this dream…
I was in this place, which was vaguely familiar…can’t place it…sort of a compound with old houses, patchy moist walls, overgrown plants and so on…and one of my teachers (where she came from, I don’t know!!!), who is also a friend now, asks me to help her in discussing something with her students…for this we had to go from this place I described to another place…I went in a car and the driver was Anthony, the driver of one of the professors in our college (how Anthony came in to all this is something I don’t understand…)…so, Anthony drives me to this place, which is totally unfamiliar, which is a nice enough kind of a building…I get down and proceed towards the building when I see this rather shed like structure with earthen floor and thatch like roof…this structure had a door like opening over which hung a kind of banner or board announcing the name of a stationery/book shop…I forgot all about my teacher-friend and went inside…
As I entered, I saw that the shop was to the right…an open kind of shop, which had stuff arranged in wooden steps on a platform kind of structure at a height of some 5 to 6 feet from the floor…there was this person sitting there…I asked him if he sold fountain pens…he said ‘yes,’ and showed me a fountain pen made entirely of wood, not ebonite…I have never seen anything like this before…it was sort of flat looking…had a flat but ‘bulged in the middle’ kind of barrel, and a similar flattish section…it had a nib, but the pen did not have a cap…I asked him the cost, and he said, ‘six’…and then added, ‘for 10 more rupees, I will fix a better nib’… so I presumed the cost to be ‘sixty’ rupees…and asked him to fix the better nib… the entire shop looked like a pen workshop…he then took out a box and hunted around for the ‘better’ nib…this much is still clear…then, things appeared vague for some time…
Sometime during this, I reminded myself that I had sauntered in to this place and that I had actually to go and meet my teacher/friend…as I was thinking about this, and slowly started walking out, with an intention of informing them of my whereabouts and coming back, I saw that my friend had come out to see where I was and saw that I was coming out of this pen shop…and she smiled, saying, ‘haan…it had to be a pen shop, that’s what was keeping you, are you coming in or not?’ I remember making a silly face and sort of said that I’ll be there with all of you soon and went back in…and what I remember is this person giving me this wooden pen with a nib fixed and of all things, a ‘lantern’ attached to the nether part of the barrel …I was kind of taken aback…it was not a battery operated torch, but a proper kerosene or spirit ‘lantern’ with a wick and glass cover and a bottle like thing to hold kerosene/spirit…and it was sort of fixed…a lantern usually swings from its handle, but this lantern didn’t swing from the bottom of the pen…it was not a big lantern, but it was longer than the pen…around 8-9 inches…the entire thing measured around 15 inches…slightly longer than a foot-ruler…he gave me this ‘pen’… I didn’t know what to do with this…how am I going to use this, I thought? I asked him the price and he said, ‘1,500 Rupees’…from 60 to 1500 was a big jump…I was hesitant…
And then I remember asking him if he had any ‘Wilson’ fountain pens…he then asked a young chap to look after my request…this young man then came and sat cross legged (I don’t know where he came from…I didn’t seem to notice him before) at the counter-like structure and pulled out a wooden tray kind of thing, which had a lot of compartments…each compartment contained a different part of a fountain pen…some familiar and some totally unfamiliar like thin light blue plastic-like rectangular pieces…I was intrigued …and this young man proceeded to put things together from this tray to make this pen… I have never seen anything like this…he looked like a jewellery shop worker… I asked him something, I don’t remember what, and this man looked up…to my surprise, I saw that this was no longer a young man, but a man clearly above 50 years of age…when this replacement occurred, I can’t say…I don’t remember what I had asked him, but what he said must have been in response to my query…this elderly person asked me not to buy that particular brand…because that is not good…or something to that effect…by that time, the pen I had asked for was ready…I hadn’t realised that a pen could be made like this…assembled in front of your eyes…like pizza with your choice of toppings…I asked the price of this pen, and he said 1,000 rupees… again, I was taken aback…a thousand rupees for an ordinary pen!…but I wanted to buy that pen…
Somewhere around this time, I must have woken up…and I could recall some parts vividly…I haven’t dreamt of fountain pens before…must have been an overdose of fountain pen related talk and discussions with Hari and shopping in Gaya and Hyderabad, all those photos and posts here and at FPN…must have taken its toll… when I realised what had happened, I sent an SMS to Hari telling him that I had gone totally bonkers and related in a few words what I had seen in my dream…Hari is understanding in these matters and sent a reply soon enough, saying with written laughter that I was now totally assimilated…
I might have taken some liberties with the sequence of events, but I have tried very hard to retain in memory whatever I had seen in the dream by going through the whole sequence every day till today…But, that image of the ‘lantern pen’ will remain for a long time…I wish I could draw well, I would have sketched a rough drawing of this great multipurpose pen…!!!
I was in this place, which was vaguely familiar…can’t place it…sort of a compound with old houses, patchy moist walls, overgrown plants and so on…and one of my teachers (where she came from, I don’t know!!!), who is also a friend now, asks me to help her in discussing something with her students…for this we had to go from this place I described to another place…I went in a car and the driver was Anthony, the driver of one of the professors in our college (how Anthony came in to all this is something I don’t understand…)…so, Anthony drives me to this place, which is totally unfamiliar, which is a nice enough kind of a building…I get down and proceed towards the building when I see this rather shed like structure with earthen floor and thatch like roof…this structure had a door like opening over which hung a kind of banner or board announcing the name of a stationery/book shop…I forgot all about my teacher-friend and went inside…
As I entered, I saw that the shop was to the right…an open kind of shop, which had stuff arranged in wooden steps on a platform kind of structure at a height of some 5 to 6 feet from the floor…there was this person sitting there…I asked him if he sold fountain pens…he said ‘yes,’ and showed me a fountain pen made entirely of wood, not ebonite…I have never seen anything like this before…it was sort of flat looking…had a flat but ‘bulged in the middle’ kind of barrel, and a similar flattish section…it had a nib, but the pen did not have a cap…I asked him the cost, and he said, ‘six’…and then added, ‘for 10 more rupees, I will fix a better nib’… so I presumed the cost to be ‘sixty’ rupees…and asked him to fix the better nib… the entire shop looked like a pen workshop…he then took out a box and hunted around for the ‘better’ nib…this much is still clear…then, things appeared vague for some time…
Sometime during this, I reminded myself that I had sauntered in to this place and that I had actually to go and meet my teacher/friend…as I was thinking about this, and slowly started walking out, with an intention of informing them of my whereabouts and coming back, I saw that my friend had come out to see where I was and saw that I was coming out of this pen shop…and she smiled, saying, ‘haan…it had to be a pen shop, that’s what was keeping you, are you coming in or not?’ I remember making a silly face and sort of said that I’ll be there with all of you soon and went back in…and what I remember is this person giving me this wooden pen with a nib fixed and of all things, a ‘lantern’ attached to the nether part of the barrel …I was kind of taken aback…it was not a battery operated torch, but a proper kerosene or spirit ‘lantern’ with a wick and glass cover and a bottle like thing to hold kerosene/spirit…and it was sort of fixed…a lantern usually swings from its handle, but this lantern didn’t swing from the bottom of the pen…it was not a big lantern, but it was longer than the pen…around 8-9 inches…the entire thing measured around 15 inches…slightly longer than a foot-ruler…he gave me this ‘pen’… I didn’t know what to do with this…how am I going to use this, I thought? I asked him the price and he said, ‘1,500 Rupees’…from 60 to 1500 was a big jump…I was hesitant…
And then I remember asking him if he had any ‘Wilson’ fountain pens…he then asked a young chap to look after my request…this young man then came and sat cross legged (I don’t know where he came from…I didn’t seem to notice him before) at the counter-like structure and pulled out a wooden tray kind of thing, which had a lot of compartments…each compartment contained a different part of a fountain pen…some familiar and some totally unfamiliar like thin light blue plastic-like rectangular pieces…I was intrigued …and this young man proceeded to put things together from this tray to make this pen… I have never seen anything like this…he looked like a jewellery shop worker… I asked him something, I don’t remember what, and this man looked up…to my surprise, I saw that this was no longer a young man, but a man clearly above 50 years of age…when this replacement occurred, I can’t say…I don’t remember what I had asked him, but what he said must have been in response to my query…this elderly person asked me not to buy that particular brand…because that is not good…or something to that effect…by that time, the pen I had asked for was ready…I hadn’t realised that a pen could be made like this…assembled in front of your eyes…like pizza with your choice of toppings…I asked the price of this pen, and he said 1,000 rupees… again, I was taken aback…a thousand rupees for an ordinary pen!…but I wanted to buy that pen…
Somewhere around this time, I must have woken up…and I could recall some parts vividly…I haven’t dreamt of fountain pens before…must have been an overdose of fountain pen related talk and discussions with Hari and shopping in Gaya and Hyderabad, all those photos and posts here and at FPN…must have taken its toll… when I realised what had happened, I sent an SMS to Hari telling him that I had gone totally bonkers and related in a few words what I had seen in my dream…Hari is understanding in these matters and sent a reply soon enough, saying with written laughter that I was now totally assimilated…
I might have taken some liberties with the sequence of events, but I have tried very hard to retain in memory whatever I had seen in the dream by going through the whole sequence every day till today…But, that image of the ‘lantern pen’ will remain for a long time…I wish I could draw well, I would have sketched a rough drawing of this great multipurpose pen…!!!
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Discovering some vintage Indian fountain pens in Gaya, Bihar
Plato 14 kt gold nib pen
Indian Waterman Cap and Body engraving
Indian Pilot Capped
Dear friends…
This time around, I am writing about some FP discoveries that I made in the pilgrim town of Gaya in Bihar, India…Gaya is Shruti’s hometown and I was visiting her parents and I was there for a week…ok, before going there, FP buff that I have become now, I was wondering whether there would be some shop in this town that would have some FPs…I wrote to my good friend (and fellow FPN-ian) Hari, informing him that I would be going to Gaya and that I’d be on the lookout for FPs there…promptly, in his next mail, he sent me the address of a pen shop in Gaya…
It was with a great deal of scepticism that I went to this shop, Sainani Pen Corner, on the third day of my stay in Gaya…I imagined it to be a big shop, bustling with customers, and would have undergone changes and would now be selling Indian Parker Vector FPs and left over Camlin FPs, the ubiquitous FP brands that one commonly finds in Indian stationery shops… if I was not on the lookout out of the car window, I would have missed it, the look of the shop turned out be an anticlimax…it was slightly more than a hole in the wall…what could I find here?
Anyway, Shruti and I went to the small counter and there was this man (Anjani Kumar Sainani)…I asked him whether he had any fountain pens…he gave me a recent model called Montex…I asked whether he had any ebonite old FPs…I think, that cooked my goose…he realised he had a mad FP fan…he said that he used to have such pens in the past and maybe one or two are still left over and that he’d have to search…the shop was stacked till the roof with old dusty cardboard pen boxes…he then proceeded to show me some really old Indian steel nibbed FPs…names like Kingson, Olympic, Wilson … I had heard of Wilson, who used to manufacture FPs in India with their HQ in Bombay…I asked him the prices of these pens and he told me that the price list is with his brother and that he’d let me know…and all these were steel nibbed ones…he told me he also has Swans and Waterman and Pilot gold nib pens…and that he’d have them in the shop in a couple of days…and asked me to come back two days later…and then he showed me a brand called Plato…with 14 kt gold nib…it was really good looking, red in colour with a broad band on the cap…vintage… almost 40 years old…and the price he quoted was too much…I didn’t have the heart to buy the pen, though good looking, at that price…that day, I could buy only a Kingson FP, as that was the only FP that he was able to quote any price…in the evening, I called up Hari and told him about my visit and the pens that I saw and the prices that were quoted…my heart was really after the Plato G-Nib pen…Hari told me that the Wilson steel nibs were ok, but the price for the Plato was way beyond even the most inflated rates that anyone would quote…and Hari also requested me to buy spare specimens (if available) of any pens that I bought or saw…and Hari, ever practical, also asked me photograph the Plato gold nib pen, even if I didn’t want to purchase it…this was real good advice…with Hari’s various advices in mind, I went there two days later, with hope in my heart and a reasonable amount of money in my wallet…
I had kept aside a couple of Wilson and Olympic FPs earlier, and when he saw me, he took them out and told me the price…I was stunned…it was too much…he then showed me Swan (Cambridge) steel nib FPs and an ebonite Wilson…and a mottled orange flat top/bottom Wilson (this looks like ebonite, but I am not sure), also steel nib…I was sorely tempted…but the price he was quoting for these steel nibbed FPs was too much…once an FP addict, always an FP addict…with a heavy heart, I started selecting the proffered pens…he had two mottled orange and two zany designed Wilsons…I took them all…he had two Swan Cambridges…I took them too…and the Wilson mottled brown ebonite, he had only one…I took that…so, I had purchased 8 pens, along with the Kingson, two days back…I mentally counted the money I had and decided that I couldn’t afford the Olympic FPs…then I remembered Hari’s advice on photographing the G-Nib pens, and I asked him to show me the Plato…and wonder of wonders…apart from Plato, he proceeded to display some more G-Nib pens…an Indian Pilot GN, an Indian Waterman, and another Plato GN with piston pump filler…I was stunned…I have posted the photo of the shop and I think you can understand my reaction on seeing these pens…but the price that he quoted for each of these was astronomical…he was not willing to even reduce 1 rupee…therefore, buying them was out of question…so, following Hari’s advice, I managed to photograph them in their various poses…and have posted them here…
But the bigger and important point is that at one point in time in the 1960s, international pen makers like Pilot and Waterman and Swan had set up shop in India and were manufacturing these pens in India…and they were manufacturing machine made gold nibs here in India… and many old timers have said that they were using these pens, albeit steel nibbed ones, in their school and early college days…it also speaks a lot that an obscure shop in an out of the way town like Gaya has old stocks of these pens…and as Hari said, during one of our ‘pen-cussions,’ the Sainani Pen Corner must have had its glory days…but, all that is history now…these pens are no longer manufactured here and all that we have are some left over FPs and these photos…
I thank Hari wholeheartedly…as you can see, he has been with this episode right from the start…giving me the name of this pen shop to offering various suggestions during the purchase and discovery of these pens, and finally for uploading all these photographs, so that I could post them…you can see all these photos at www.fountainpennetwork.com in the pen photography forum…
This post is written and photos are posted, more with a sense of history than anything else…a kind of glorious chapter in the history of Fountain Pens in India…
I hope this entire narrative was not too tedious for your reading pleasure…
Thanks…
Jayasrinivasa Rao
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