June 30, 1997. The day is as vivid in this writer's memory as yesterday. The academic session for Class four was to commence the following day, and there was something more thrilling than the joy of new books, a school bag, water bottle and lunch box.

We had been upgraded from pencils to the fountain pen, and a good part of the summer vacation had been spent in figuring out what made for an ideal "ink pen", practising writing with it so we didn't end up with inky fingers - and marvelling at this writing device that somehow took the legibility of our handwriting up by a few notches. What you write with a pencil can be easily erased; what's written in ink is permanent. It felt like we had grown up, and the realisation came with holding a fountain pen in our fingers.