Misgivings of a pen

Ah the smooth flow of ink gliding over the paper with a lustre that could blind your stationery senses! The smell of varnish rolled out by a tiny little ball demanding your approval. Buying a pen is always satisfying - you know what you want, it's a quick buy and purse-onally speaking, very affordable.

We hoard our homes and office desks with pens of different colours, types, why, sometimes even rank (for those special occasion ones). Yet, it defeats inventory and logic that when you need one, it's never at your disposal. If you do spot one, hiding in some nook, it never fails to fail you - it just won't comply! No matter how much you scribble, it'll always leave you frustrated; I'd like to gently bring the adage - "A pen is mightier than a sword", at this point you might feel like destroying this metaphorical weapon itself.

And then there are days when writing would be absolutely satisfactory - you'd write pages and pages and just when you're about done, the feeling of dread freezes your tired fingers - you know it's happening, but it can't be happening, right? - the ink trails off and you wail in pain (mostly from all the finger numbing writing you did over the past hour or more) - "No, no, no". You beg and plead to the mighty pen, "Please don't give up on me, not now, please..."; Well, we've all been there, haven't we? We know how blotchy that ending is. There's no use crying over spilt ink.

Ink residue that smears your favourite/neatly drafted pages, soils your clothes (the best ones, always), nibs that tear through the page of your favourite notebook as you passionately scribble away; pens have their misgivings, like we ourselves do and sometimes one can't tell the difference.

In this age of technology where the closest thing to a pen is a stylus and paper is an application, the flow of the thought from the mind to the tip of the pen has lost its grace. From a time where the focus on was writing sensibly and staying focused on the task (writing) to avoid strikeouts, we've been taken over by autocorrects and typos, losing all that we've learnt, as basic as spelling a word correctly.

The author and the pen share a bond like no other. If we were to reflect on this, plenty conclusions may be drawn to human mood and behaviour, control and outburst, presentation and failure and a great deal of other things.

P.S: I did consider publishing a photo of this article in writing, but woefully, my pen gave up on me midway.