The back to school market mania.

The last week saw the reopening of schools after the summer break in the part of the world I live and was surprised at the back to school offers. Newspapers carried entire supplements screaming offers on all the wares a school kid needs.

There were sections dedicated to Pens, Pencils, sharpeners, erasers (rubbers for less initiated ones like me), style statements and gadgets. Why was there a back to school offer on cars by a leading car maker I wonder.

A leading writing instrument manufacturer was promoting a pencil and promising you ‘unbreakable creativity’ with an ABS on their pencils. They call it Anti Break System. I was given to believe that their lead breaking was controlled thanks to a protective coating. Pencils were made out of wood from PEFC certified sustainably managed forests. God knows what it means. The only time I felt a pencil was more complicated than rocket science. Pens were competing with each other on low friction and the meters of writing it produced. One even compensated the flow of ink for the rapid changes in air around, which was some fluid dynamics I thought. They came in shades, sporty, casual, bright and pop style. After analysing a few, the clear winner was a Xylene and toluene free pen that did a cool 1200M of writing and also came in even cooler colours. Whattay design!!!

Another was selling a pen that was fade proof, fraud proof, and time proof. I wonder why they did not think about all these when I was younger but I almost got the answer immediately. Our passions never faded, we were too innocent to indulge in fraudulent activities and some of our memories were timeless.

The correction pens entered the fray as the saviour, after all the low friction, air adjusting smooth writing pens and more importantly your grey cells had failed you. Even these were competing with each other on their inbuilt evaporation system efficiencies.

Now the lead might not break but it sure does abrade away. So don’t we need a sharpener? The sharpener for me was my dad who never let me touch the blade when I was a kid. Well my kids are fortunate because my dad did not teach me how to sharpen a pencil with a blade so I had to buy my kids a sharpener. A sharpener with a built in option to adjust the degree of sharpness and point angle was on offer too.

Well there were offers for designer bags, school wear with ink resistant pocket, anti-bacterial socks and here I sense a small inter industry rivalry. When the pen makers are busy making anti leak pens the shirt makers are designing anti stain and ink resistant fabrics.

We as kids carried nice little bags made of khaki coloured ruck sack material and our back to school wares consisted of a black coloured fountain pen though the more fortunate ones carried a ‘HERO’ pen which had those nice shiny golden caps that sported a built-in filler. The lesser mortals carried the above mentioned fountain pens filled with ink from Bril ink bottles using a filler at home and exactly knew the quantity of ink required for a Maths, Science, English or a History paper. We also had a standby pen in case of any force majeure event. Additionally we carried a Nataraj pencil for all our drawings and a Red pencil that was our highlighter along with an eraser that could only erase pencils markings. So you actually had a small tolerance for error when using your pen and that was the perfection we were in pursuit of. There were shops that could replace nibs, clean feeders and other components of our pen and refurbish the same.

In the same back to school week, I had the privilege of attending a seminar by Mr Anand Kumar of the famed Super 30 Training institute of Bihar which churns out IITians year after year from the lower strata of the society. After his speech and his methodologies I realised, all that a child needed was a good teacher and not the best of infrastructure or instruments.

I wish to conclude by drawing your attention to a reply by a kid when asked what he considered his best talent was that I came across recently. The reply went thus ‘I’m trying to master the art of being good with people’ he said. I’m not sure if he was taught this by his parents which in my opinion was a bad piece of mentoring. But sad to see the world reach a state when 11 year olds think being good with people has become an art that needs to be mastered.