The good old fountain pen that people laid to rest in their heads long ago may well be on its way to regaining at least some of its lost glory across the globe, thanks to reasonably priced fine writing instruments made in India.
An American citizen, on his business trips to India, realised Indians had good handwriting and it was the result of great penmanship. A quest to improve his own handwriting, which he describes as "chicken scratch", led him to discover the affordable fountain pens manufactured in India.
The answer for a good longhand, for Kevin Themann, lay in the fountain pen. Also, in what the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, who apparently had terrible handwriting, said about "bad handwriting" being "a sign of imperfect education".
Themann was parked at an online pen networkers' forum when someone asked him the inevitable - about the Indian fountain pen.
"I received a message from a fellow member asking me if I had run across any of the Indian models. I didn't know such a thing existed but the question made me curious. So began my hunt for Indian-made fountain pens," writes Themann on his website fountainpenrevolution.Com, which has hues of the tricolour on its masthead and is dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi.
Soon enough Themann was on a buying spree -- for himself and for his friends in the US and also collectors -- for affordable Indian pens, which he claims were being manufactured in India to promote good handwriting.
"So began my hunt for Indian-made fountain pens. In the course of the journey I have learned much about India's long history of affordable and useable fountain pen manufacture and of Gandhi's story, which is shared on the homepage. Not only did I begin buying these pens for myself, but I also took a bunch home to the US and began marketing them to US collectors. Thus began our quest to make these hard to find pens more available to the world market," he wrote.
