Is Pen Mightier Than The Sword?

This is one of the quotes that has made me rack my brains, “Pen is mightier thn sword”. You mean it is easier to ri9ght people down than fight them down.? If someone rushes at yu with a seord if you show your pen he would cow down.

But how relevant is this quote nowadays? We are licving in a world where the pen is no longer used for writing and the sword for fighting, unless it is the fencing sword used for sports or ISIS or al Qaeda sword used for making people sortr by a head for politely begging to differ from them.

And oh pen, what can one say about it? What a fall it has had! From an instrument that people suspected was naughtier than the sword, it has almost beome a mere fadson accessory. It is not used even to sign the sheet the courier boy gives you after delivering the goods because courier bouy don’t give papers now. All of them have a gizmo on which you are supposed to sign with something which remotely resembles a pen but is not.

Ganted kids, at least in the ;less developed countries write exams anfd do homeworks with pens? But how long? I suspect even this is on thre way out. Smartphones anf laptops might replace pens in the near future. Even on TV you don’t see the ballpoint pen ads in which Sachin Tendulkar jumps out of nowhere to promote a pen brand.

Pens have become meaningless status accessories in the higher echelons of society. Showing off a couple og Mont Blancs in your coat pockets is an indicatiuon that you have plenty of money to waste
In such a situation pen is mightier than sword? Pah!!!!

True you can’t use your pen to behead people at least swords serve that purpose.. I haven’t touched a pen for ages thanks to my keyboard.

But wait, pen is indeed mightier than the sword so pleasw ignore my earlier “Pah!”.To understand this let us go to a country cousin of Napoleon who is reported to hacve said pen is mightier than the sword.—Michael de Montaigne.

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature and as readty at hand as any” the famous philosopher-essayist has said. So what does old Mike ((He deserves our contempt for stating the obvious and not only familiarity breeds contempt but contempt also breeds familiarity. Hence Michael de Montaigne to Mike) got to do with swords and pens.?

Sctaching is ndeed a pleasurable activity but it is not always an easy activity. There are parts of body where your hand can’t go or go only with difficulty to scratch. Dot get ideas, I mean your back.

Npw let me get a bit cateist. The Brahmins have certain privileges one of which happens to be the so-called sacred thread (so-called for unbelieving lapsed Brahmins like me). It is a very flexible tool for scratching your back. You can m,ove it any which way and it will go where no hand has ever gone before to provide you one of the sweetest gratifications of nature.

But what do lesser mortals without thread or those who have thrown the thread away for good like me do? Here’s is where pen comes into picture. It eases the trouble of scratching your back. You can take it to corners of your back where your hand can’t reach on its own to provide old Mike’s pleasurable activity. It is high time for a TV ad in which Sachin happily scratches his back with a ballpoint pen and endorses it has the best back scratched.

How does that make pen mightier than the sword? Well if you don’t believe that adage, all you have to do is to substitute pen with sword for Monsieur de Montaigne’s (well it is high time the guy got some respect)) sweetest gratification and let me know the results.

 

Very true in an age when pens are slowly losing their ground to the keyboard, the adage as
ishwa says should be keyboard is mightier than rifle".. As for parker pens why, any kind of fountain pens we don't see them much these days. If anyone flaunts a parker h as a status symbol, he/she would be laughed at. Pems like Mont Blanc re still used s status symbols. but their role in writing has come down drastically. I used to see bvzallpoint pen ads on TV until a couple of years ago but even they seem to have disappeared We are definitely living in the age of keyboards. We are azll trapped in the worldwide web.B

 

Hindu columns with coffee? Sabitha, I have A house in a TN city. And in my lane they are all literate, prodfessional people. And believe it or not none ogf them buy newspapers! When I asked one of them. he said there wsas no need as they get all their news on TV. They don't even realize that TV makes you a passive consumer while when you read you think and react.The written word is disappearing slowly. It may survive mong ordinary Joes due to social network sites like IL or Facebook. But its life is slowly ebbing. In another half a century the way we get information or express ourselves is going to change radically and sorry for being pessimistic, non-creativelky.

 

Yes Tamrakshar, keyboards are becoming redundant. But I still prefer my old not-so-smart mobile, in which I have to press the keys, Touchscreen trrchnology unnerves me.