We fountain pen people are weird. Every month, around the start of the month, we do a version of the same thing: we make lists. What inks to put in what pens. Rotation schemes, seasonal palettes, elaborate spreadsheets that make a lighthearted hobby look like the desk of an air traffic controller. Not that I know what that looks like.

I tried doing all of it. And I hated it. I like four or five colors, and they are all blue. Jokes aside, throw in some gray, just black, lavender, pine green and purples — but everything with an undertone of blue. If blue was good enough for Miles Davis, it’s good enough for me.

My point is that the whole inky contortion was beyond my abilities. And then my friend Gailyn of Fountain Pendulum changed everything completely. By presenting a new way to fix this equation of pens and inks.

She announced her 2026 ink theme: tea. Every ink she uses this year would connect, in some way, to the world of tea — its colors, its moods, its quiet ceremony. Not a random rotation. A story.

I saw her video, and felt the particular feeling that only comes when someone solves a problem you didn’t quite know how to articulate.

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”
— Wassily Kandinsky

I spend most of my time in California. I don’t have any major trips planned. At least for now.

That’s not a complaint. California contains multitudes, and more specifically it contains San Francisco, which means I have access to some of the most atmospheric light on earth roughly half the year, and the other half I’m under a fog bank so beautiful it makes my heart ache. I moved to San Francisco 23 years ago for a couple of years. Now you know why.

Fog. I have penned enough pieces about fog and its magic, and its metaphorical meaning, by now. “I like the muted sounds, the shroud of grey and the silence that comes with fog,” is how I once described its hold over me.

George Sterling, over a century ago, wrote “The Cool, Grey City of Love” and there is this one most beautiful passage that just makes me stay:

The winds of the Future wait
At the iron walls of her Gate,
And the western ocean breaks in thunder,
And the western stars go slowly under,
And her gaze is ever West
In the dream of her young unrest.

Whether it is life itself. Or appreciation for a place where everyone is trying to invent the future. Or embracing the idea of all of us trying to exist in their own alternative universes. Or a combination of all those. Those are broad brushstrokes of why I have stayed.

So I asked myself: what if the city was the palette?

San Francisco sits between ocean and bay, between the Pacific and the hills, between cold water and coastal air. The colors it produces are not the bright primaries of a travel poster. They are layered. They shift. They have the quality of light that painters chase and photographers wait hours for. I have spent days, hours and now almost a lifetime waiting for my eyes to embrace the changing hues in the middle of Fogust, on Ocean Beach, or when standing on the Embarcadero, listening to roars coming from the baseball stadium that just sits there like a modern-day colosseum, dedicated to keeping us distracted from the drudgery of life.

What I didn’t realize was that my collection had already leaned this way, without me ever planning it. I have created three custom inks that in a weird way try and capture the entire palette. The good people at Kiwi Inks helped create three magical color potions I call Karl The Fog, Ocean Beach, and SF Summer. But I wanted more than just those three.

So I came up with an arbitrary number. 26, because it is 2026.

Twenty-six inks, almost entirely blue-biased. Iroshizuku Kon-peki, which is exactly the color of a clear Pacific sky. Ainezu, a storm gray-blue that looks like the marine layer coming through at speed. Montblanc’s Coal Blue, smoky and deep like the bay at dusk. J. Herbin’s Vert de Gris, that oxidized gray-copper-green that is precisely the color of tidal water where fresh meets salt.

The bottles kept piling up in the closet of my overflowing home office.

I didn’t plan it this way. I just kept buying what looked right. What looked right, it turns out, was home.

Anaïs Nin said it: we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. I’ve been looking at the same body of water for years. Apparently it has been looking back.

I created a simple system. And I mean actually simple. Two favorite pens that never change, always inked with the same inks that are meant to do the heavy lifting. Two vintage pens that need the safest, most forgiving formulas. And half-a-dozen rotating inks each month, shifting with the season. These inks allowed me to indulge in the pens from my collection.

January gets Colorverse’s Blue & White Porcelain and Hachimonjiya’s Gassan Blue Moon as an homage to the winter skies, cold and clear. March brings Pilot Kon-peki and Octopus Fluids’ Minze, because March in San Francisco means the first green is starting to show. August comes in with Hello Small Things’ Good Night Blue and Montblanc Great Gatsby, because August evenings here are warm and strange and go on too long in the best way. December closes the year with Pilot’s Fuyu-syogun — literally “winter general” — a gray that looks like morning’s mystical mix of mist, fog and cloud over the bay from the Embarcadero.

The calendar writes itself when you let the place do the work.

I wanted this system because I wanted it to solve an even bigger problem. The problem of too many inks. Anyone who collects anything eventually arrives at this reckoning. The collection stops being a source of pleasure and starts being a source of obligation. You feel guilty about bottles you haven’t opened. You buy something new and feel the weight of everything that came before it.

William Morris put it plainly: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. He was talking about furniture. He was really talking about every collector who ever lived.

Twenty-six inks. A city. A year. No new purchases required. No FOMO, wondering if the new limited edition is the one that changes everything. It won’t be. It never is.

The palette is already here. I’ve been looking at it through my window for years. I just wasn’t seeing it.

Gailyn’s tea theme gave me permission to think this way — to treat a collection not as an accumulation but as a statement about what matters to you and where you are. Her year will taste like sencha. Mine will look like the view from the top of Twin Peaks on an August morning, when the fog is below you and the bridge just disappears. The fog horns sound distant. The world muted.

That seems like enough.

The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the sea-gull is her dove.
Cleanly and strong she is—
My cool, grey city of love.

— George Sterling

March 10, 2026. San Francisco

It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe River. Nothing dramatic.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I let my subconscious take control of my mind, and my hand. And with that my words, and my pen. When I stopped and read, it shook me. I had written something I have felt.

The more I look for what I don’t know I’m looking for, the more likely I am to not find it.

So I am likely to be disappointed. Be disgruntled. What triggered this was my reaction to a new nib grind. It wasn’t really living up to its billing. Not every grind or nib should, as they too are creation of a moment, the artisan finds themselves in. It was not about them. But more about me.

It made me realize, the more new nibs, new grinds I try, I end up not thrilled with the new or appreciative of what I already have.

The universe in its own unique way, was slapping me silly and asking me to stop. And just try and be happy with what I have. Not find happiness with what I can have next. After all, in the end, it is about knowing what I am seeking really.

The pattern repeats. Objects are what change.

Things that somehow add up and pile up. Another new pen. Another new nib, new notebook. It’s all a distraction. Things that seem to bring happiness, but in the end are nothing but distractions from life and the emptiness of it.

The doodling led to self-reflection, and realization, that what I was chasing wasn’t a pen. Or a nib. Instead it was an imagined feeling that something new, something novel would produce. This feeling lives in the future, in the imagined version of the experience. We all feel it, one way or the other. We act on it, one way or the other. Nibs for me. Labubus for someone else.

The actual nib and pen, once inked are nothing like what was imagined. When the nib skips, and catches on paper, the imagination has none of that. That feeling of disappointment. But this is not just about nibs.

It never was. Clothes. Books. Another notebook. Swipe left, swipe right. The rhythm is identical. You’re not looking for a thing. You’re looking for the version of yourself you imagine owning it would produce. You can’t get there. Not because the thing is wrong. Because that self doesn’t exist. Acquisition isn’t the answer of finding self. It is always elimination, stripping down to the essence. And yet the trap of our modern now is that the Lego blocks of consumerism will complete the thing that really it wants to keep incomplete.

Buddhists call this Tanhā. Loosely translated it means craving. Tanhā is the addiction to wanting itself. Not the object. The wanting. What makes it hard to see is that the seeking loop feels like aliveness. The browsing, the imagining, the anticipating. It produces an energy that feels like engagement with life.

These days we call it FOMO, the fear of missing out. It is the algorithmic, bastard child of Tanhā. Social media didn’t invent this. It surely industrialized it. Every pen post, every rotation photo, every “new pen day” thread is engineered to make your current pen feel insufficient. Not because it is. Because the platform needs you to keep scrolling.

The cost of infinite options is that you never fully inhabit any of them. You hold everything lightly because the exit is always visible. Nothing becomes what it could be if you stayed.

It is ironic. Till recently, I had been using a version of the same camera I started taking photos with over a decade ago. My new camera is a more constrained version of the original. I know it intimately. Like the crook of the hand of a beloved with whom you have walked many walks that go nowhere, but end up somewhere. I know the images before they are captured.

I am also the same person who ruthlessly edited his wardrobe down to one hundred pieces, where the new one comes only when something has to go. It is a restricted palette of colors, choices, and clothing that are determined from knowing myself, what I like, and why I like things a certain way. It is unusual to be so precise in one thing and yet wayward in the other.

The person who writes with one pen for ten years knows things about it. I should know. I used the same pen from 1990 through the turn of the century before buying a new one, to celebrate the new century. So, I should know better. Yet, the whole modern social edifice is built on the new, the novel, and the next.

As a lifelong lover of ghazals, and having grown up in northern India, my first understanding of the word Tanha comes from Urdu. It means alone.

Solitary.
Craving.
Loneliness.

Somewhere in the linguistic memory, craving and loneliness were understood as the same condition.

The seeking loop. The new nib, the new ink. The swipe left or right. The next thing. This isn’t just desire. It’s modern society’s reality of finding meaning and company in objects. It makes you wonder if one is not filling space with things, and instead it is about filling an aloneness that things can’t actually reach.

The answer is not in wanting more.

Buddhists call the practice sati, bare attention. To be with what’s in front of you long enough to see it clearly. And so attention, then, isn’t just a practice. It’s learning to be alone without reaching. To sit with the tanhā, the loneliness, the craving, without immediately converting it into a search. Concrete, in my case: I probably don’t know what my best pen can actually do. I’ve never spent enough consecutive hours with it. I switch before I find the edge. It is strange, because I spent hours, days, weeks, and months with my camera. I should have learned.

It is getting late. The notepad is still on the desk. A few more pages have been used. The ink has dried. Somewhere in the middle of doodling and testing nibs I had stopped being a collector and started being a writer again.

I wonder if subconsciously I had come to a point where I now know it is time to start paring back. Finding the joy in the intimacy of knowing something longer. A lot longer. Just as my favorite clothing. My only camera. My favorite watch.

Is this what it feels like when a pen stops being a collector’s object and becomes a writer’s tool?

I don’t know how long this feeling lasts. But something inside me says, this is the point.

“One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” — Minor White

I have not been out in the wild making landscapes for a while now. Almost a year. However, I have found new subjects to explore. San Francisco, obviously, remains my favorite muse. California is my darling. But at home, I have been exploring how to push myself creatively. And one arena I have been exploring is fountain pens — my other lifelong hobby.

I write with them. I cherish them. I collect them. What I wasn’t doing was photograph them.

I also found that most fountain pen photography is quite boring. The sameness of it. Product shots, meant more for a sale than for enhancing the beauty of objects so lovingly created. I wanted to do something different. More abstract. More me.

As the philosopher Dōgen said: “Not to seek reality apart from appearances, nor to cling to appearances as reality.”

I am trying. In the process, learning. To find beauty in the things I use to create words, which have a beauty of their own.

Two new tools have made this possible.

My friend Kiran Karnani of Harlowe sent me a couple of small portable lights — the Sol — that attach to the iPhone via MagSafe. LEDs with the ability to change color and temperature. With two of them, you can muck about with color, with shadow, with the way light wraps around a hard object and makes it feel alive. I don’t intend to become a macro expert. But these lights give me enough control to mean what I’m doing.

The second tool is a ShortStache Shift Diopter made by PolarPro. They sent me review units in 49mm and 82mm sizes. I have been using the 49mm version in combination with my Leica Q3 43, which has a built-in macro mode. A diopter, to put it simply, is a close-up lens — a secondary optical element you screw in front of your lens. It reduces the minimum focus distance and increases magnification, letting you get closer than your lens could otherwise focus. Particularly useful for macro work. Shift diopters come in three strengths — +2, +4, +8 — each pulling you closer to the subject. (I also have a Leica ElPro e52, and will do a comparison separately.)

Shift diopters opened creative possibilities I didn’t expect. The selective focus, the way sharpness falls away at the edges — it isn’t a technical compromise. It’s an aesthetic choice. I decide what matters, and the rest becomes part of the abyss.

It is an edit. Just like writing itself.

What I am really trying to do and in the process understand is how much of my approach to landscape photography translates to pens. Can I get to the very essence of their existence — not the whole object, but the fragments that tell the story? The light catching a section of celluloid until it stops being “pen” and becomes color, curve, depth.

The most important thing I keep reminding myself: leave something unexpressed. Give the viewer room to imagine the landscape. Rather than show it all.

I want to make pen photographs that feel that way. Nothing resolved. Nothing explained.

“In all things, irregularity is intentionally preferred.” — Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

March 30, 2026, San Francisco