Meeting an Old Enemy – Add Gel

I met an old enemy recently. One I’d forgotten about. One buried deep in my memories.

A friend of mine made me meet the enemy on a random afternoon. Even after all these years, there was no mistaking it. The familiar off-white cap, the metal clip. The refill inside with the earwax like gel above the ink.

There was no doubt. This was Add Gel. 

For many years, Add Gel was the bane of my existence. I grabbed the pen like Nobokov and sighed. ‘Ah! Add Gel, the curse of my life, nightmare of my childhood. My joy, my sorrow. My yay!, my woe’.

For nearly everybody from my generation, Add Gel was a source of constant tension. When I see my friends suffer from anxiety, I have no doubt that Add Gel was an early contributor to their anxiety issues.

Before Add Gel arrived, the world of stationery for students was divided into two groups- Pencils and Pens. It was a black and white world. Or should I say, a Permanent Black and Royal Blue world.

Pencils were the first writing tools we were trusted with. They were supposedly easy to write with, but had a tendency of breaking at the tip. You had to carry a sharpener and eraser along. The marquee pencil of the era was Natraj 621 Pencil. For girls, there was the Apsara Flora – the exact same pencil but with pink flowers on white, so girls could keep in touch with their feminine side.

It is not a coincidence that Natraj chose maroon and black stripes – the Nazi colours – for their pencil. For I have seen the innocent pencil put to extremely cruel uses. I have had the sharp edges of the pencil squeezed between my fingers and twisted by cruel teachers. I once saw a classmate place a sharp pencil on the bench when someone was about to sit. Our white uniform led to a traumatising patch of blood on the guy’s posterior – a gory, unwarranted prequel to Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. I have seen guys keep a sharpened pencil in their pant pockets. Only for the tip of the pencil to pierce their thigh like a Viking spear.

Only when we graduated to 5th standard, were we considered worthy enough to use pens. The world of pens was further divided into ink pens and ball pens.

We were told that ink pens improve our handwriting, so they were preferred. Teachers of subjects that actually mattered – like Math and Science – never bothered about the pen you used. But it was the Hindi and Social Sciences teachers who were finicky about the use of the fountain pen. I have never understood the emphasis on handwriting. At the risk of sounding pompous, I have very good handwriting and even taught Calligraphy for a while. 

The story of how I stopped teaching Calligraphy is an interesting one. I was teaching the kids in my workshop about strokes and obliques, when an old man tottered into the workshop.

‘What is going on?’

‘Sir, Calligraphy. Ahem…like the art of beautiful writing’. 

In classic Old City Hyderbadi style, he asked-

‘Yeh seekhe toh kya hota?’

And I had no answer. Actually, kya hota? Kuchh bhi nahi hota! 

That incident made me realise how useless of a skill, how vestigial a good handwriting is. I have never come across anyone famous for their handwriting. Or someone famous who had good handwriting.

I sometimes wonder – after all those punishments and impositions – when teachers retire and sit down over drinks – do they drunkenly admit that they fucked up with their emphasis on a good handwriting? That they hadn’t imagined a world with smartphones, social media and the Internet. That nobody would actually write anything after graduating from college?

Fountain pens came with their unique set of problems. You needed to carry an ink pot to fill your pen. The pens themselves came in a few basic designs. The basic Camel/Camlin pens with a thick base. The startup MyMuse now sells them as vibrators on Instagram. There were the Chinese/Hero pens that wrote smoothly, but the nib was as fragile as Indo-China relations. The expensive ones came from Parker, peddled by Amitabh Bachchan. The proprietary refills were as difficult to find as a hit by Abhishek Bachchan. Perhaps, as a warning – the series of Parker pens was called ‘Beta’.

The ink from ink pens would leak into your pocket, your books, your bag, and eventually your soul. The earliest version of Bluetooth 1.0 was when we got Camlin ink on our teeth. You were surrounded by the smell of ink, and filling an ink pen was an experience as pleasant as trying to mount a Camel/Camlin while it’s looking for water in Rajasthan. You needed an ink filler for the process, and you better carry one along. ‘Cos if you used a syringe, you got strange looks from one and all. ‘‘Are you doing drugs? Do you know that people prick you in a dark hall with a syringe and a note ‘Welcome to the world of AIDS”?

Ball pens were convenient, but were not given respect in society. Your ball pen of choice was either the arranged marriage pen –  Reynolds 045 Fine Carbure. Then there was the dependable Cello Gripper. And the trauma inducing Linc Starline – in which the ink stuck to anything it found like a Symbiote. 

Ball pens were easy to hold and carry. And since this was the 90s, the usage of plastic wasn’t frowned upon. Greta Thunberg’s parents were in school, and with the liberalisation of the economy in 1991, people were simply happy to be surrounded by colourful plastic in pens, tiffin boxes, and cricket bats. For all practical purposes, ball pens were the preferred pens. When not under the watchful eyes of our teachers, we all chose ball pens over fountain pens.

Exploiting this dichotomy in pens, entered the villain in the market – Add Gel 

Gel pens provided a unique opportunity to satisfy both the parties. You didn’t need to fill ink into the pen, and yet the writing looked like a fountain pen’s. You needn’t look like the blue-tongued genie in Arabian Nights, and still develop a good handwriting and go on to become the next Boutros Boutros-Ghali. 

There was one issue, though. Add Gel pens cost 25 rupees. And even if you managed to get hold of one, the refill itself cost 15 Rupees. 

15 Rupees! Kids of today won’t be able to fully grasp the value of 15 rupees in the 90s. Sometimes, the entire amount of pocket money given was 15 rupees. The price of a film ticket was 15 rupees. Suhaagan ka sar ka taaj was 15 rupees. Har student ka khwab was 15 rupees. Pen might be mightier than sword, but using an Add Gel was as expensive as a sword back in the day. 

I have had friends who cut the refill and used the remaining gel as hair gel. And others who sucked on the gel, making them look like failed characters in an X-Men audition. 

But it wasn’t just the price of the pen and refill. Add Gel had another cruel trick up its sleeve. The refill was notorious for running out with astonishing speed. Sit down to write an exam, and the ink would run out before you could say ‘Atal Bihari Vajpayee’. On a good week, an Add Gel refill would last you a week. But if the punishment meted out to you was to write ‘I will not talk in class’ a 1000 times, the refill would run out in two days. 

An Add Gel refill was enough for exactly ONE social studies exam. Or for writing ONE love letter (including all the practice sessions and iterations to the final letter). Which meant that you couldn’t use an Add Gel for all the extra-curricular activities required of a pen. Like drawing goggles on Gandhi in the history text book. Or playing book cricket. Or to sign your name a hundred times on the back of the notebook. Because along with a good handwriting, you needed a solid signature to become the next Elon Musk. 

Which meant that you were caught up in the pocket money debt trap. You first bought the Add Gel, and then began saving up for the refill when it ran out. Like owners of electric vehicles who go through Range Anxiety, you went through a Refill Anxiety. But with the smooth writing and convenience, you were hooked to the evil pen. In a few weeks, you were like a meth addict – desperately looking for your next hit at the stationery shop. 

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Like Narasimha tearing open the stomach of Hiranyakashyap, I removed the wrapper. How had the pen aged? How did it survive the onslaught of the Internet, iPads, and magic pencils? 

The wrapper advertised that the pen still came in four colours – red, blue, black and green. There was some bullshit about Japanese technology, along with the tagline ‘World’s Finest Gel Pen’. 

‘World’s’? Was this a global phenomenon? Were kids around the world tortured by this pen? Was this Japan’s revenge for Hiroshima Nagasaki?

The price was hiked to 50 rupees, which probably made sense. At least the brand had survived two decades. I couldn’t say the same for some of my favourite childhood brands – BSA SLR, Nutrine, and Ravalgaon. In a way, I was happy that the pen had survived. 

It still wrote smoothly. I looked at the pen. Why did I harbour such strong feelings towards an inanimate pen from 20 years ago? Was I a psychopath? 

Add Gel wasn’t trying to harm me. It was a company selling their product at a mentioned price in a newly found capitalistic economy. So why was I so angry about it? Perhaps my anger towards the brand was unjustified.

And then, I saw the bottom of the packaging. And found a quote that said ‘Quality First. Cost Second’. Not only was the cocky quote put on prominent display, they had trademarked the quote too! 

This was a cocky company that prided itself on selling premium products to children who were struggling with their pocket money. 

I decided to use the pen till the refill ran out. And when it’s done, I’ll fling the plastic body as far my eyes can go. Or fling it at the annoying pigeon that does vocal exercises outside my balcony, proving that pen is indeed mightier than sword. I will carry the pen to the plastic recycling unit and watch it get crushed to fine dust. 

I am not a psychopath, after all. It’s an evil pen. 

Fuck you, Add Gel! 

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