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The first I heard the word 'soft' applied to an object was in 1955 when I was in my high school at our village Muthukur.
My strict HM Father one day took pity on our poor drawing teacher and let him sell (for a tiny profit) Tip-Top 'soft' pencils made in Japan and insist that we all buy them from him and use them and only them in our drawing classes.
The Tip-Top was a revelation. Till then all we had were cheap pencils imported from England and they were a punishment. They were bare, without the 'rubber' at their crest, writing with them was a hard travail since their 'leads' broke every minute, and all we had for shaving them was half-a- 7 O' Clock shaving blade also imported from England. We bled profusely, and the result of our writing was invisible...the leads were as hard as our heads.
Tip-Top was a breeze. It wrote easily, the leads never broke but smoothly wore out, but the wood was as soft as butter. And the writing was as dark as Lord Krishna.
But they cost a hell...all of Rs 0.25. But they were worth it...all of us got very high marks for our lousy drawings ;)
Half a century later, when I was shopping for pencils for my kid-son at Thackers at IIT KGP, and asked for a pencil, Mohinder asked back:
"What brand and what grade, sir?"
And it turned out that the Faber Castell pencils that were a rage then came in twenty odd grades of darkness and hardness:
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The first I heard the word 'soft' applied to an object was in 1955 when I was in my high school at our village Muthukur.
My strict HM Father one day took pity on our poor drawing teacher and let him sell (for a tiny profit) Tip-Top 'soft' pencils made in Japan and insist that we all buy them from him and use them and only them in our drawing classes.
The Tip-Top was a revelation. Till then all we had were cheap pencils imported from England and they were a punishment. They were bare, without the 'rubber' at their crest, writing with them was a hard travail since their 'leads' broke every minute, and all we had for shaving them was half-a- 7 O' Clock shaving blade also imported from England. We bled profusely, and the result of our writing was invisible...the leads were as hard as our heads.
Tip-Top was a breeze. It wrote easily, the leads never broke but smoothly wore out, but the wood was as soft as butter. And the writing was as dark as Lord Krishna.
But they cost a hell...all of Rs 0.25. But they were worth it...all of us got very high marks for our lousy drawings ;)
Half a century later, when I was shopping for pencils for my kid-son at Thackers at IIT KGP, and asked for a pencil, Mohinder asked back:
"What brand and what grade, sir?"
And it turned out that the Faber Castell pencils that were a rage then came in twenty odd grades of darkness and hardness:
I then started wondering if any crazy boy would ever buy a 9H pencil as hard as a stone, and if so why so.
The answer came a couple of years later when I was invigilating. It was a girl and not a boy but.
It was reported to me that a chap sent to our Diro an anonymous e-mail that this dame has been cheating in exams from her infancy...he was her classmate and was sore that she walked away with all the top grades while he stuck to truth like Gandhiji (the original) and got as low grades as Gandhiji.
It turned out that her technique was as simple as her swoon. She brought a clipboard with her which was perhaps allowed:
And at home the night before her exam she would take a 9H pencil and scribble in the tiniest calligraphy her class notes for the entire semester:
And none could see it but her since she brooded over her clipboard like a hen on her precious chick:
I am told that nowadays there are far more impressive ways beating cheating:
...Posted by Ishani
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