Pen and Paper

Once upon a time there were ink pens and ink wells and a little dent in the desk to place them. They were followed by fountain pens. Then came the ball point pen, a major innovation that totally transformed stationery stores. Refills in bubble packets.
Today is the age of the gel pen. Buy not just one pen, a personal possession, but a whole packet of quick-to- use- easy-to-throw six inch sticks that run out of ink ever so quickly to make you buy more! Keep writing and scratching out. It's quite easy. I must admit gel pens are convenient because if you asked the ink, oh sorry, the gel, inside them, I am sure it would say it didn't care about the kind of paper it wrote on. It has no real preference in that sense. The frustratingly thin paper in my scratch pad or "rough notebook" is just as good as the 90 grams per square metre luxury paper from France. The paper certainly seems to care though. As for me I like the uniformly thin lines I can write with plastic one way gel pens as compared to the ball pens of the same price.

Nothing compares to the fountain pen though. With real liquid flowing out of the nib. The drawback being that fountain pen ink is a rather more selective being. It needs paper in which it does not bleed. And ink-ready paper may be the standard in Europe but here in India getting notebooks that are able to hold the ink out is a matter of buying notebooks of some expensive brand (and often getting disappointed). No wonder broad nibs on fountain pens are not as popular here.

As it has been with writing so it will be with typing too... There is a wide variety of keyboards available that react to pressure, typing speed and all those. I wonder what they feel like and whether somebody has done extensive research on those. But then the world is full of people who work for companies that need to find out minute details of the force exerted by your digits on your keyboard when you type your next blogpost... So I suspect that yes, somebody has.

(Image from http://www.marcuslink.com/pens/)