Pen-Seived

     "We write to taste life twice; in the moment and in retrospect”
      - Anais Nin

We let ourselves lose on a simple blank piece of paper. Our bodies spill the terror, the love, agony, anguish, laughter, hope.

 A PEN was another name given to our voice, another name given to our tongues. It didn’t matter how cheap or expensive, venomous or sweet that tongue was, the words that came out got all the limelight.

 Every notebook told stories—stories about those long lost days of the student life, stories of discovering newer experiences of travel, stories of close guarding secrets you’re most likely not to divulge, stories of sheer nonsense---- stories defining YOU.

 The advent of technology was a welcoming change. We got our first computer way back in the year 2000 and things just started changing from thereon. The pen lay motionless on the table for months at home while the notebook served its purpose only in school. Copying manually became a thing of the past. Xerox and printouts took on the front seat. As for writing……..it just got lost somewhere in the chaos……..


Flashback:

It was class V where a sense of growing up started to give its initial feelers. It's symbol? The transformation from pencils to something known as the INK PEN.

The device came along with an array of other attractions which included cartridges, nibs, ink erasers and the ink bottle of course. We also learnt the alternative use of our nose dropper---to fill up the think tanks!
We grew wary of smudged pages, to blow gently on paragraphs just written before closing our exercise books. The weather always played spoil sport with humidity ensuring yet another obstacle; as if picking up the correct exercise book with a precise thickness of paper to prevent ink bleeding wasn't hard enough.

 Moreover I used to admire my teachers who just grew to accept our Rorschach ridden assignments with immense forbearance and patience.


Present:

Times hav chngd. Sh8ning clothes, wrk, wrds has becum a fad. It's an age of SMS, Whts Apping, BBMing, Emailing. Letters on paper? Post cards? What's tht?

Growing up may include an increased height and age - in some cases even maturity, but for everything else Reduction of effort is the key mantra. No one enjoys getting mail anymore, or at least no one enjoys seeing a pile of envelopes nor a  brown cardboard box with a smiley arrow on the side.

The joy of flipping through your pile of circulars, bills, and statements and coming across with your name handwritten in red ink sometimes seems like it’s lost forever.

 We live our lives in public now. We check in, add photos, update "whats on our mind" on a moment by moment basis. The food we look forward to seeing on our plates are now just photos on Instagram.

The pen which was mightier than the sword once upon a time, has now reduced its worth .The device that meant pride, spoke of power, excellence, intellect today finds it utility in a to do list, taking down addresses and phone numbers.

 Every compulsion, every thought expressed rather seeks solace on Facebook than a notebook. Thankfully the hand that taught us the A..B..C's , still encourage the endearing commitment between the pen and paper.


After Thought:

Computers, smart phones etc have made our lives easier-jotting down faster than one thinks . But at the end of the day, is it a race between the thoughts and the written word or is it just the written word alone? Is manual form of writing becoming endangered?

I spend 12 hours a day behind a keyboard. Spiral notebooks and fine writing utensils won’t be found among my business tools. To get a glimpse of the future, just look at today's youth. The incessant use of emoticons for that personal touch in expressions instead of curly Qs or loopy Ls is proof enough.

So endangered is the written art that a century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts. When our great-great-grandchildren find that letter of ours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist,or to an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them.

What are we losing by moving to a keyboard-based form of text communication? Does it even matter?

In spite of all this, I haven’t lost hope. I decided to write this manually first and then type for the online audience. Looking at the doodle I made while writing this note , I realize the presence of an involuntary smile and a sense of relief.

I’m glad man hasn't developed the art of doodling and writing at the same time technologically. No computer can carve your name on that bark of tree, it is you and you alone capable of doing this .

So what, I wonder to myself as I set a physical pen to an actual piece of paper, can I possibly have to say to my friend that she doesn't already know? And even that worry in itself is a symptom of this skill I used to have and use so well. I used to simply begin and then continue, fancy flying from my pen as often as fact, until I ran out of paper and squashed my superfluous name into the corner. I am out of practice. Which is normal and fine, because aren't we all?

We communicate more often, but the degree to which we communicate personally is lesser, surely. Everything’s in snippets and flashes: a hundred and forty character tweets, YouTube videos. No longer do we describe things in detail. No more the lengthy epistle, the expounded opinion, the exaggerated anecdote.

I may be worrying about this unnecessarily; it’s possible that this is a trivial concern. Certainly we've gained more than we've lost with all these new devices, but that’s no reason to let it go completely. And it’s so easy to bring it back.

Think about how nice it would be to receive letters and postcards again, unexpectedly. Not because it’s your birthday, not because of any reason in particular, but just because someone wanted to write their thoughts onto paper and send them to you.

I leave it to you now what do you want to do with that motionless pen lying on your desk for quite a while……..pick up and make someone feel happy or just make it pass through the sieve…..