Finding a New Hobby

 The year is 2021. And we have all been stuck at home for about a year now, due to ‘a global pandemic’- I swear I’ll throw up if I hear this phrase one more time. 

I was in a strange place in my life - there have been several false starts and instances where things were finally looking up and well - at work and in personal life- until they weren’t. I had time on my hands and space in my mind under circumstances where both were unbidden for my mental health. I also had some dispensible cash from all the staying-home that I have been doing this past year. 

My trusted Google told me that all these could be put to good use in some investments (yeah, no!) or travel (yeah, right!) or to start some collections (yeah?!). The next thing I searched on Google was “what do people collect?”. Yachts, jet planes and cars came up. I wondered who Google thinks I am. So I modified the search to “what are cheap things to collect?” A long list which included stamps, coins, trading cards, comics etc. came up. Among the list were 3 things that I found functional while being reasonably interesting: pocket tools, watches and fountain pens. Now this year also saw the launch of the Apple Watch- series 7. And ‘tools’ meant apps one can download into an iPhone (13?!). Yet here I came to see that good ol’ mechanical watches and physical tools command quite a loyal following. 

After quite a few weeks watching endless videos on YouTube, reading countless blogs and forum pages and browsing nearly all of the online stores, I realised that pocket tools were not a thing in India and anything worth carrying around - Everyday Carry - EDC, for short - is not really mainstream chic. By this time however, I had already ordered a few pocket tools from the US, a Victorinox Rally and dug out the Victorinox that I impulse-bought in Switzerland years ago. I then had to look up the make and model to figure out how to use all the tools in that one. For the curious ones, it’s a Super Tinker and came in quite handy over the past year since I made it my EDC.

The next step along the way was Watches: not the quartz ones that run out of battery, but those automatic, mechanical time pieces some of which Google again told me were heirlooms that could last generations. It made functional sense because well, low maintenance appealed to my lazy-ass side. I was just peering inside that rabbit hole, dipping my toes in with a Seiko 5 and a Citizen when I realised that watches were indeed expensive. For context, a Rolex is really the cheaper, mainstream watch in the grand scheme of collectible watches. Not a collection I could build on my stay-at-home savings over a year. 

That brought me to Fountain Pens: a no-brainier, since I already had one at hand and could try my hand at it with no risk at all. I had gifted this one - an engraved Parker Frontier - to myself a few years ago and used it for journaling occasionally. I had a love-hate relationship with that one, primarily because I use it so rarely that the ink dries up way quicker than my use. Also, I had some really good roller balls which felt better to write with. 

However, the more I started learning about fountain pens, the more I realised that my knowledge and experience have been trivial. A month in, I hunted down a local store and bought a Pilot Metropolitan and it was tremendously better than the Frontier. A Lamy Safari followed a few months later and I was hooked. What followed is months of anticipation and life going on. As I write this, I have just received a much anticipated new batch of fountain pens and I know I found myself a new hobby.

Manish

02-02-2022