Pencil-Box

It was a trip down memory lane as I reminisced the good old primary school days when the classroom was a melting point of the middle class and the extremely affluent.

Given than everyone wore the same uniform, a kid's net worth was well represented in a few essentials: the water bottle, the lunch box and its contents, and the pencil-box.

Back then I had a simple pencil-box. The kind where you would open the box and stuff in all your pencils, eraser ( or 'rubber' as we called it) and the sharpener.

I never really had to buy a pencil-box. Most of my friends' parents were creatively challenged so for every birthday party I would have atleast 7-8 different types of pencil-boxes as birthday gifts.

Frankly speaking, buying a gift for your kid's friend's birthday party is one of the most agonizing routines Indian parents have faced since Manmohan Singh opened up the economy. Thus gifting a pencil-box is the safest option for an Indian parent taking their kids to their friends’ birthdays. It always comes across as well-meaning- "You should study well beta. Ok?” (Yeah! and then give you nightmares as the kid studies hard and scores more marks more than your son)!

The stock of pencil-boxes at home were also the supply of gift ideas for birthday parties my sister and I went to. So it would often happen that a pencil-box I received as a birthday gift would travel across 2-3 homes and again wind up in our house as a birthday gift for my sister.

I particularly remember my green metallic pencil-box in class 5. It had the cool dude 'Fido-Dido" character from 7-Up laced all over it. I would carry one ink pen and 2 pencils, along with an eraser, an ink eraser and a sharpener. Oh and a ruler!

The box had 2 compartments. The upper tray had my precious Hero ink pen (we had just graduated to ink then), and my ruler tucked underneath that. Not surprisingly the ruler always had ink stains. The lower tray had more room; it housed the 2 pencils and the rest of the armory.

Most of the time though, the bottom tray would be full of pencil shrapnel. Buried inside the shrapnel would be stickers collected at the local kirana store upon buying Britannia, Lays or Cadbury goodies. I remember wanting to collect 1 more sticker so that I would win a jackpot to meet Sachin Tendulkar and drink Pepsi with him. Or a chance to fly to Australia and get a kangaroo ride. On one occasion I had even packed my bags.

The rich boys in the class had hi-tech pencil-boxes. You pressed a button and a lever opened out to sharpen the pencil. You pressed another button and the upper tray opened up. You pressed one more and a side panel opened up to pick up the eraser and dump all the pencil shrapnel). It was classic Toy Story! Years later it would inspire Rajnikanth.

The version for the girls, I remember, was in pink and had a button which when pressed would throw open a mini mirror. Girls often carried little candy in their pencil-boxes.

Pencil-boxes also found another use in pencil-box fights. This was in addition to the pencil fights, pen fights, rubber-fights, sharpener fights, and rubber-sharpener fights.  Today we call it the IPL.

Most boys would use their pencil-boxes to hoard chalk-pieces for throwing at each other. The girls would steal all the colored chalks, so they could help their mothers with rangoli at home (as i learnt from my sister) Sorry teachers!

In high school, the pencil-box became a little less relevant. Most people carried what I would call a pencil 'pouch'- a bag like carry-on, the shape of a pencil-box, with a zip and string to ply along with. My sister loved these because she said it gave them early introduction into what would later become their handbags. They had gorgeous colors and varieties of different designs. Most guys had black or grey ones.

Those were good times indeed!