While leaving for an outstation trip recently, I happened to walk in to the Eternal Gandhi outlet at Mumbai Airport. Eternal Gandhi is a project by the Aditya Birla group and the products are also sold on their website http://www.gandhisouvenirs.com
As per the website that sells these Eternal Gandhi souvenirs,
"The idea is to create awareness about Gandhiji’s ideology and his undying spirit and spread his teachings in India and around the world through sale of various souvenirs like crystal mementos, apparel, personal accessories, office accessories, business gifts, figurines, timepieces, books, music, motion pictures and so on."
I had checked out the outlet earlier and had noticed some pens, but none of the pens really caught my eye. There were only a couple of fountain pens and they did not really look worth spending time on.
However, this time was different. This time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of nice, oversize pens and also a couple of sets with fountain pens and ball-points.
I picked up the two oversize pens as an early birthday gift to myself. Here are some impressions and pictures.
They come in a pretty good cardboard box and the two pens I got are a Red one and a Brown Marbled one. My gut feel is that the Red is inspired by Visconti (cue the clip) while the Brown, Marbled one is inspired by Delta (cue the cap band and overall shape). The logo of the Eternal Gandhi brand - an image of the Mahatma walking - is on both the caps.
Both pens have screw-on caps and take standard international cartridges. They both came with a short standard international cartridge and I managed to swap these with spare standard international converters without any issues.
As of now, my only gripe is the overall quality of the pens - it is not easy to screw the cap on or even screw the barrel and section together. This shouts out "Quality Control Issues." I went over both pens with a loupe, but was not able to identify the original source from where they could have come. Any help/information in this regard is most welcome.
Hope you enjoyed this.
Cheers
Sudhir
