Of Pens and more!!!

We are scheduled to head up to the old school in the hills of South India this weekend for the Grand Raffle Draw in the school. Well, the prizes for the big draw are a) First Prize - 40" LCD Television b) Second Prize - Apple iPhone c) Third Prize Asus Notebook Computer and d) 20 Consolation prizes.

The consolation prizes were to be a beautiful pen set that the children in school would love to have. It was my job to source and ferry items b, c and d up to Ketti! So I went about trying to find these here in Chennai and with some luck managed to get hold of these within the stipulated budget. Well, this story is about my search for the Consolation prizes - the pen sets! I would normally set out during my lunch break to find the goodies - checked out the Spencer Plaza, Landmark (the mega book store here), several small stationery dealers and more but I somehow didn't find something that fitted within the budget AND was good enough to excite the kids in school!

Yesterday, on my lunchtime mission to find lunch and those pen sets I ambled into a mall right behind my office and discovered a pokey little stationery shop. The owner a 40 something Marwari businessman asked what I wanted and I told him what I was looking for - it turns out that this gentleman has been selling pens for close to 30 years and he claimed he has stocks of almost every conceivable brand of pen in that small store! To test him I asked if he had refills for a brand of pen called Caran d'Ache - its a relatively unknown Swiss brand and he says 'Ofcourse, Sir, those are, in my opinion, the best pens in the world'! He hauls out about 10 models of those pens with a price tag starting at 7,000 bucks! Ofcourse, I flinched when he cited the price! And he goes on to tell me that if you own one of those pens and you lose it anywhere in Europe, you need only make a police complaint and send the copy of that police complaint to Caran d'Ache and they will replace the pen free of cost via courier! Then he says he has pens that he has personally sold at the most astounding price of Rs 800,000!! He went on to show me a pen with a miniature projector fitted in its top which allowed you to watch a full fledged DVD movie projected on a wall (screen size 7" across)! He then pulled out a pen that was smaller than the average pen but he said it has a refill that will not need replacement in the lifetime of an individual (calculated at 85 years!).

I was gobsmacked by now at this man's knowledge of his product and asked him why he chose pens as a business specialty!! So he says, 'Sir we Marwari's believe that the pen you have in your shirt pocket and the one you have in your pants are the two most important instruments in a man's life - how they perform and what they do can make or mar your life'!! How's that for a business rationale?!!

I learnt something about pens and life yesterday and that too in my own backyard!! One lives and learns I guess!!