Kolkata, India
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Click President – go on, leave your mark on history!

Click President – go on, leave your mark on history!

I am a teacher and like all teachers, among the many other things that I do, I also have to correct innumerable examination papers. While I have always been a fountain pen user, preferring to write with my trusted companions, I do not know exactly when I had shifted to using ball point pens to correct the exam sheets. However, I know the reasons that had compelled me to make the transition. For one, the quality of paper that my school expects the students to write their answers in (and the teachers to correct) is so abysmally poor that no sane person would dare to test their treasured fountain pens on them. Besides, some of the answers do test our patience (here I talk of all my colleagues) and we are scared that the boiling mercury would somehow trickle down to our cherished fountain pen nibs, resulting in a cataclysm of the worst kind.

Click President

Imagine my happiness then, when I was presented with a Click President with a roller ball nib. The pen fills up with regular ink (that too drawn up with a piston filling mechanism, no less), has the look and feel of a regular fountain pen, and comes fitted with a roller ball nib attachment. The person giving me the pen was considerate enough to have thrown into the bundle a regular Fine nib, just in case, but that is another story. What I absolutely adore about the Click President is the broad, wet disposition – the beautiful lines it writes with, even on the tissue quality paper on which we hapless teachers are expected to write our evaluation comments. Yes, there is the problem of feathering and blotching, but as my husband – a fountain pen fanatic many notches above me in the pecking order – pointed out, the disease can be arrested (not cured, mind you) by a cocktail of dry ink and fast writing. For once, I am happy with his suggestion.

Like I was saying, writing with the Click President is a sheer pleasure. As a matter of fact, I am so enamored with the roller ball “thingie” that I am yet to use the standard nib, even while the pen has become my daily carry, also compelling me to again take-up my old hobby of journaling. Thank you Click.

Click President

What the Click President has also done is to convert me into a kind of a fountain pen crusader. I am shamelessly flaunting my pen to my colleagues in the staff-room and am passionately making pleas to them and to my students, to consign their dot pens to the dustbins and embrace the joy of writing with fountain pens and ink, so that together, we can work to reduce our carbon footprints and reverse the ill effects of global warming and climate change. As a matter of fact, strange as it may sound, the fact that an average student uses an inordinate amount of use-and-throw plastic pens which end up in our sewers, silently chocking our riverine systems and polluting the sea beds, was not something that was well comprehended even by the teachers before the Click President was gifted to me and one thing had led to another. I am also encouraging my students to take up writing with the fountain pens as it has been my experience (as a student myself) that writing down things as we study helps in the better retention of information leading to a better grasping of the knowledge being sought to be acquired. And finally, in these pandemic-induced, digitally damned, depressive days, the pen and ink can be the cathartic tool that most of us have been looking to provide our children with. Besides, the fountain pen as an aid to help improve handwriting is something whose importance cannot be overemphasised. Now let me tell you something as a teacher from my own experience of working with adolescents for many years – poor handwriting often leads to poor scores, which in turn leads to falling self-confidence, often leading children on a downward spiral. Believe me, it is a dangerous descent which can be reversed just by encouraging children to improve their handwriting among other things and I believe a beginning can be made with just inspiring them to pick up a fountain pen.   Thank you Click, you don’t know what you have done for our children: as a stepping stone to the wonderful world of fountain pens and inks, this President with the roller ball attachment will, I am sure work wonders. The President, whatever other meanings may be ascribed to the term in the dictionaries, is commonly understood to be the head of the state and is someone who is enormously powerful. It is my hope that the Click President too is true to its name and spread its positive influence among our children to pull them out of the quagmire of discarded dot pens.

Click President

Endnote: I am not a member of the Fountain Pen Ladies: Fine, Medium and Broad Group in Facebook, and I confess that I browse through your posts only occasionally. I am jotting down my thoughts on a whim and am sending it to you in the hope that you will publish it so that more like us, especially mothers of children and teachers, can take part in the conversation that I hope will follow.

And thank you Click. Hope you start contacting the schools and impress upon them the need to urge children to switch to fountain pens.

I am not disclosing my name as I am a teacher and I do not wish to belittle the school I work in – though I feel that the paper they provide, like most schools these days, is really terrible, that the schools should address this issue immediately and that somehow this piece will be the first step of a journey of many such steps leading us all in the right direction.

For More information about Click pens: http://www.uniquepen.in/

 

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