We asked finance professional and management executive Jay Jayeshwaran about cheap ballpoint pens, luxury fountain pens, and all things stationery.
Q. Tell us your stationery store memories as a child.
A. I remember as a child going into these stationery stores in Bombay and in Mysore. And they were small stores stacked with loads of books and textbooks and notebooks all around.
As a child one of my prized possessions, and this was in primary school, was a Staedtler pink sketch pen. Pink was my favorite color, then. Otherwise I never really used sketch pens and never really had the pack of 10, 15 or 20 sketch pens that lots of kids had.
But, yeah, I remember walking into these stationery stores with loads of stationery, all stacked around, and the smell of new books. And then spending the first week, 10 days in June when schools used to reopen, getting my parents or my mother to wrap my books with the brown paper, which I never figured why.
Pink was my favorite color, then.
Q. What’s a specific piece of stationery that’s important to you?
A. While I was a child I did have a prized possession, which was a hand-me-down Sheaffer Pen from my grandfather, that’s when we graduated from writing with pencils to writing with pens. It was initially fun to fill the pen with ink but eventually became extremely messy. Me with not having too much of patience didn’t really last long with the ink pens. I am also quite clumsy and kept dropping those pens and breaking the nibs. I didn’t do that with the Sheaffer Pen but I did that with other cheaper ink pens.
But a blessing in disguise was the Reynolds ballpoint pen which was easily available, with a change of really cheap refills, and that pretty much pulled me through secondary and my college days. I remember I was doing my masters in England but asked my friends to send through postage the Reynolds pens. So that’s how much I enjoyed writing with them.
Q. Confessions of a stationery minimalist?
A. Post university I pretty much just pulled through using ballpoint pens or whatever was around. As of now I just have a cheap ballpoint pen and two notebooks. One is used for taking notes in meetings and the other one is for my music teachers to write into. Otherwise I don’t have any other prized or expensive stationery.
I know friends who are very impressed with Japanese stationery, especially Muji‘s and the like but I couldn’t care less. During my professional career I never really had any Montblanc pens or any of those expensive ones. Well, I guess I’ve lost the novelty factor for those expensive, wannabe pens that people have, especially men have in their pockets.
Hi, this is Jay Jayeshwaran, I’m neither a writer nor a painter.
