There are very few people who are single-mindedly devoted to ensuring the growth and development of the indigenous fountain pen industry. Prof Yashwant Pitkar is one of them. An architect by profession, Prof Pitkar has been an avid collector and user of fountain pens for many decades now. As a matter of fact, such was his collection, not to mention his passion for touring campuses to inculcate the habit of using pen and ink among the young, that he was dubbed the “travelling inkpot” by the media!
“One area where the Indian fountain pen and ink industry is lagging is in designing,” says Prof Pitkar, who has made it his mission to address the issue. He has conducted several workshops with his students at the JJ College of Art, where he introduced them to the world of fountain pen design and then guided them as they gave shape to their ideas. Taking the movement further, he conducted a similar programme at the IIT (Kharagpur) between the 13th and 15th October and 5th to 7th November, 2025.
The Workshop was attended by 22 Masters students and was facilitated by Prof Shreyas P. Bharule, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture and Regional Planning of IIT Kharagpur, who incidentally, was not only a student of Prof Pitkar, but also is a fountain pen and ink aficionado. Initial design sketches submitted by the participating students were individually evaluated by Prof Pitkar, with most of the students incorporating his suggestions in their final submissions. The submissions were exhibited along with a 3-D printed prototype on November 7th2025, for which distinguished guests, including Professor Joy Sen of the department, the Managing Director of Swadeshi ink maker Sulekha, Kaushik Maitra, and yours truly, were invited.
In the extremely lively interactive session that followed, brief talks were given about the current state and prospects of the fountain pen and ink industry in India, after which queries from the students were answered. Hailing the initiative as an example of “industry-academia interface,” Kaushik Maitra thanked the organisers for onboarding Sulekha, expressing his resolve to take the unique initiative to fruition.
Fruitful talks were held between the Professors of IIT and Sulekha. Both sides welcomed the initiative as an icebreaker and talked of their determination to take the initiative further, through to its logical end – making of “designed in India” fountain pens, made commercially available to connoisseurs around the world. The participating students expressed their desire to visit the factory premises of Sulekha to acquaint themselves further about Fountain pens and ink making, a request that was immediately acquiesced to.