Sometime last year, my friend from engineering college days – G. Balakrishnan – who we simply referred to as “GB” (engineering students of four decades back were well ahead of their times in recognizing the uselessness of multiple syllables or even the need to spell out everything – which, I am glad to see, the current generation and social media is finally getting around to embracing 🙂 ) had sent a rather strange request from India.

His request was to give some time over the phone to a friend of his who lives in the Bay area. I assumed the gentleman – Shriram Narayanan being his name – would want to discuss career move related topics. The request was strange because what his friend wanted to discuss had nothing to with work at all. It was about my blog! Apparently, he had a lot of questions.

I finally got to call him up on Oct 27th. I was driving from one meeting to another and took the call from my car. A scheduled half an hour meeting went over an hour. I still remember discussing finiteness of time, how do we recognize in ourselves what we are good at and such absorbing topics. Regrettably, I had to end the call since I had to go to a meeting.

This trip to SFO, I actually caught up with him face to face. Over a cup of coffee, we continued with where we had left last October. The discussions were refreshing and invigorating. Truth be told, I have not come across too many people with whom I can have this kind of in depth discussions on very different topics. (Magesh Ranganathan pops up as an immediate exception to my mind)

“Learning” was a big topic of discussion this time around. Why we learn and how we learn. And why we stop learning. How we learn from experience but that in itself is a tricky process since that assumes accurate recollections from memory – which is an absolute myth. (this does not include certain other kind of learnings – like skill learning – biking, swimming – where the brain somehow involuntarily commits to some parts of memory that it has no problem recovering on demand even after five decades!)

Hope to have more sessions with Shriram in the future.

I thought I knew a thing or two about fountain pens and nibs and all that. But at the end of the evening, I realized how little I knew about what makes those pens and nibs come to life. All because I got to have dinner with a pen pal of mine from the other end of the world.

Let’s back up a little. About twenty years back, I had a colleague at work – Madhuri. She was fifteen years younger than me and we worked in two different ends of the world – Dallas and Bangalore – but of course, we knew each other since we were in the same team.

It was much later – and by that time, she had moved to Singapore with her husband Rupesh – that we realized we shared a common fascination for writing with fountain pens. It was a post on Facebook that she had put up that had triggered my attention.

And that started a long series of writing letters to each other – between Atlanta and Singapore. The topics invariably were about life, travel, parents in India, old friends and so on.

In one of those letters earlier this year, she let me know that they were moving from Singapore to San Francisco. Even after they moved, the letter writing continued. In fact, just last week, something happened when I was setting up my small workspace in the new house. I was carefully putting her last few letters in my letter organizer when Nikita happened to stroll by. I showed her some of the letters and she justifiably marveled at the beautiful handwriting.

Well, guess what? I met up with Madhuri and Rupesh for dinner this evening. The board meeting scheduled in San Francisco offered this opportunity.

I never quite told you what makes fountain pens come to life, did I? Well, that is where Madhuri’s expertise comes in. Paper and ink. I am always frustrated by the quality of paper in the USA. Got some great tips on how to choose paper and some good brands from Japan from her.

You all think I am nuts that I have over 100 fountain pens? Get this – she has 65 different colors of ink!! I have only 8) I learnt a lot about the chemistry and quality of inks from her. I even picked up some new terms like “sheening” and “pooling”. She had brought a few different varieties of paper to demonstrate her points to me.

Incredible evening for me!