The Joy of writing with the Pencil: ‘Almighty Pencil’

You remember those school days when after our long summer holidays one would get back to school. The entire episode of going to the school and collecting the new notebooks, class books, text books… Goodness! They smelled really great! Even today when I open a new book I feel I am back to school. After the note book shopping would get over it would be time that we buy new pencils, sharpener & erasers in different sizes and shapes and colours. Those days we didn’t have much choice yet many of us would bring different stationery. And it was always fun showing them off to your friends. Till the time we were in 4th standard we were not allowed to write with pens. At that time we would fancy about writing with pens n would wonder how it would feel while writing with one. At that time, we never valued the joy of writing with pencils. Pens were something that we always longed for. Later, when we got the chance of writing with pens, we never looked back.

We were absolutely surrendered to pens n discarded all the pencils which were personally shopped for. We used them only for geometry classes; we would not use it otherwise. They were out of craze then. Our teachers would also recommend that we avoid using pencils and insisted that we write with pens. I always thought that it was injustice to our friend in learning. The only chance I got to use pencils profusely during secondary education was when we would attend the drawing classes.

I loved to draw and from then on I trained myself and developed an interest in Sketching. I still do sketch, write with pencils. The same pencil that once taught me to write was now teaching me to draw… to express myself. It has been one of the most special discoveries/ invention that one has made, such a magical one, so smooth… smoother than honey. It’s lead would flow with the direction you gave. It was like a film that you were directing and every letter, word, sentence, paragraph would be the screenplay. If you didn’t like something there was always an eraser to edit it. Hence, a small world of your film, directed by you.

Remember the first time that you ever wrote something, how happy you were to see your own creation in front of your eyes. This was, is, and will always be the magic of the pencil – the ‘almighty pencil’. It brought the first smile on your face and on other too.

I hated those days where we were not allowed to use pencils for writing. I later had realized that when I wrote with a pencil, I wrote with great joy which actually brought my character, personality alive in my words written with the magical pencil.

It has been years I don’t write with pencils nor do I draw. But I really miss the joy of it. I wish I could go back to those days where I would always write with pencils. Just a few days while I was travelling in a train I found these wonderful shiny coated pencils a vendor was selling, which I later bought. They were the same pencils that one of my batch mates in college had bought and I had begged her to lend me one of them.

You may say that it is very stupid/ kiddish on my part to be writing on a Pencil. But to know the true value, one should ask an artist, he will tell you what a pencil means to him and will tell you his association with it. I am not saying that I am an artist, but only a pencil lover.
Even today, along with my cheap/ expensive pens, I always carry a pencil with me. I recently went to a stationery shop to buy some dairy and ended up buying these fun pencils that are colourful and a joy to write with.

Authors Note:
The whole concept of writing on pencil came to my mind when I actually purchased these extremely colourful pencils. The original write up was actually written with a pencil. And last but not the least I am a stationery freak, Lover, fanatic.