Love for Fountain pens and Mechanical watches
Some people close to me know my love for Fountain pens and Mechanical watches. I am not a fan-boy of either. I don’t know the different materials used in a fountain pen, different mechanisms in a mechanical or automatic watch, how are one design or model different from others, etc. If you bring a watch enthusiast or a pen enthusiast, make them debate with me, I’ll definitely lose. I even tried becoming an enthusiast by diving deep into the intricacies, yet they never hanged onto my brain. I’ve thought a long time why? Why don’t I like the variety but just the concepts? Guess the way these two make me slower is what I love.
I even love books for the same reason. These aren’t self propelling and are slow. Very slow. And I like slow. I like to own a single pen for years, refilling it every week by myself from an ink bottle, cleaning it every month so that it works smoothly, putting it back in the same box I got it delivered in. Though I don’t own a mechanical watch, I like the fact that it has to be manually wound every day for it not to stop working. All of these deliberate actions, which takes time and patience.
They live with you. They work only if you take care of them regularly. “But Rahul, even a ball point pen needs a refill every couple of months, and change of battery in a quartz watch every year or two.” Yup, but they don’t live with you. The watch keeps ticking for a year though it’s in a shelf. The pen still works even after two months of not writing. Not a Fountain pen and a Mechanical watch. The life in them keeps ticking away if you don’t show love. In Fountain pen, nib dries out in mere days, so as in a mechanical watch energy drains away in hours. It’s as if these two are waiting to be picked again from the point you put them down.
Many argue we need things which free up our time to be productive. Well my productivity comes out when I’m slow and dragging. If you see me running all over to complete tasks, that’s what I’m doing, just completing them. Only when I am gazing a slowly rotating fan or walking slowing looking at an empty road, is when I’m thinking through a difficult problem. The slowness helps me go through the thoughts, filter the required ones and plan my problem through. And we miss it. We all miss it.