KOCHI: Pens have always been a fascinating object for Vadassery Thomas Jolly. “Pens have never failed to fascinate me since childhood. Whenever I see an expensive or unique pen, I have an urge to keep it. Due to financial constraints, I have never been able to own one in the past,” says Jolly.
Jolly, a 55-year-old Manjummal native, popularly known as ‘Penman’, has collected around 30,000 pens till date. “When the private company I used to work for shut down, I started taking up house painting jobs. It was around that time that I started collecting pens that house members were planning to discard,” Jolly says.
Jolly’s love for pens has made a traveller out of him. He has been to many places in search of pens. “Over the course of time, my unique hobby got reported by several media houses. I used to visit the houses of doctors, advocates etc (those who use pens a lot) with these news reports. In their letterboxes I drop a letter along with a copy of the news report, requesting them to give me their used pens,” he says.
Stacked neatly in boxes, Jolly has a vast collection of fancy pens, including a radio pen, a voice recording pen, a spanner shaped pen, a Chinese pen with a perfume bottle at the end, a cigarette lighter pen, a pearl embedded pen, a diary pen, and many more. Out of the lot, his prized possession is the ‘big red pen’ from Israel. He got it from Pastor Damien of Pathadipalam.
Over the years, with the support of many, Jolly was able to expand his collection. His treasure also includes the contribution of many eminent personalities. Pens used by Justice V R Krishna Iyer, Mayor Tony Chammany, and MLA Hibi Eden etc are part of his collection. With this distinctive hobby, V K Jolly has bagged 16 world records. He got a place in the Limca Book of Records for four consecutive years. His collection also got him to the Asia Book of Records and the Universal Records Forum. All for having the largest collection of used pens in India.
Jolly’s dream now is to get into the Guinness World Records. Due to space limitations in his house, he had to segregate quite a few pens out of the total collection of 30,000. He had to part with the rest. With the mission to bag the Guinness World Records for having the largest number of varied collections, he has picked 7000 ones from the lot. The collection has pens from 34 different countries.
“It is one of my biggest dreams to get into the Guinness World Records. The pandemic and the expenses one has to bear etc have posed some major obstacles,” says Jolly. Along with the pen collection, Jolly is also an avid photographer. He has been capturing photos of native flowers since 2018. With his mobile phone Jolly has clicked 1,800 different varieties of flowers so far. The flower collection has already made it to the Arabic Book of World Record, Universal Record Forum.
He has also given an application to the Limca Book of Records. “WhatsApp good morning forwards paved the way for this newfound passion. It all began when my friends started forwarding the good morning messages, which usually has the picture of flowers. To respond to it, I started clicking pictures of flowers on my mobile phone as I didn’t know how to forward such messages. The botany department of St Teresa’s College, Kochi, has helped me with listing out the scientific names of the flowers in my collection,” says Jolly.
The penman of India, V K Jolly, is preparing to enter the Guinness World Records with his pen collection. But his dreams don’t end there. Jolly is adding many more interests into his repertoire to set new records