A quick Google search on ‘the start of the human civilization’ will leave you with approximately forty-one million results; most likely Wikipedia being the first to be listed.[break]
For human ‘civilization’, it all started with the invention of the wheel, I suppose; or fire was it? Or the Pyramids? I am not sure. For some - the Romans and the Greeks.
For me, as far as my memory takes me, the ‘sisakalam’ or pencil did it for me. The yellow, ‘HB’ engraved, pointed, sort of magic wand like, only beyond magic, pencil did it for me.
I still remember my parents used to buy me assortments of sisakalam every time, and sisakalam was what we used to get as prizes in schools, gifts on birthdays, and in exchange for an eraser or a ruler with a friend.
Those sisakalams that we got for our gifts lasted almost the whole year; so that the next birthday party insured another fresh collection of pencils that would last another year.
As far as individuality goes, every kid in the community owned exactly the same set of stationery. My childhood must have been delusional where pencils were cloned and never went out of supply.
In abstraction, a sisakalam meant knowledge, it meant expression, achievement and a sisakalam meant friendship. During classes, we used to rub the tip of the pencil lead on the wooden desk to sharpen it (a pencil sharpener was a bother for an invention, as far as we knew) and leave black-silver dusts marks under the wooden panel and all over our school uniforms.
When I look back, sisakalam was the most prized possession for me; I used to neatly arrange them in my geometric box, alongside an eraser and a set of triangles and rectangles.
I made sure that they remained sharp, ready to be used at the first call of the teacher and never ever did I lose one.
I am not sure what happened to those pencils after a while. As we started to grow up, the prizes got replaced with those green, hard cover Eagle exercise copies (Oh, what, promotion it meant for us kids then!); gifts got replaced by dresses and elaborate toys, and kids got possessive.
Gradually, the allure of a sisakalam got replaced by a fountain pen. In Grade 5, a vacation meant homework/projects and we were made to use an ink pen to write our essays for the first time.
For no apparent reason, a pen became mightier than a pencil. My sisakalam, unattended and ignored for the years to come, remained unused except for the geometry class.
It took me more than a decade and the end of 2011 to revisit my childhood and find my love for sisakalam. And thus goes a roundabout story on why my blog’s name is sisakalam.
But to put a more intellectual twist on it, I also thought what an irony it would be to title an ‘online’ blog ‘sisakalam’ because that is exactly what we have forgotten to use, put it bluntly, in this blog generation. I resent my (slow) Internet and (battery-run) laptop for technology has overshadowed my sisakalam.
My resentment is with my own lackluster life. A virtual ink is in no account superior, or for that fact inferior, to a sisakalam; but surely my friends, the delight of a child who for the first time receives this magic wand cannot be replaced by Internet. Or perhaps, it can.
All I can hope for this New Year is going to be full of possibilities, and chirke mirke, rangi birangi, naulo sisakalams.
For more Sisakalam, visit sisakalam.wordpress.com
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