A Short History of Penfight
Young cousins are a hyperactive lot. In an effort to keep the runts engaged, I improvised a game played with marbles (the only props at hand at the time that could pass for toys). It was a two-minute affair, and the game was chancy, full of loopholes and not likely to amuse anyone for over a few minutes. So I was surprised to see them playing it with religious fervour two years from that boring afternoon.
I mentioned to them in passing that this has happened before, with a classroom game now known as Penfight. The expression on their faces led me to believe that I’d said something profound. I confirmed to their flabbergasted countenances that yes, I did indeed invent this game- at school in Delhi sometime around the latter half of 1997, although I was not the one who named it so.
Apparently, it has grown into something of a phenomenon in Indian high schools- venues otherwise known for inducing ennui, encouraging overt passiveness and for their deadpan deliverance of useless infodumps. As a somnolent sixth grader, I possessed not the enthusiasm for flinging paper balls tied with rubber bands around the classroom, which was what most boys in the class got around to in the absence of a teacher. Watching a classmate trying to attack a half-hammered nail on his desk with his pen, I realized there was pastime to be had here. Soon we were trying in turns to knock each others pens off his desk by flicking them.
Penfight in its original form is a simple game. There are two or more pens on the surface of a table, one per player. Players take turns trying to knock all pens except their own off the table by flicking their pen with their forefingers, much like one propels the striker in Carroms.
As a competitive sport, Penfight was perfect. In retrospect, I realize that it had all the elements of a classic- it required skill, and a fair knowledge of the playing surface’s irregularities. It was easy to get better at, but hard to be really good, as luck was a terrific equalizer. Knocking pens off a table was addictive. There was room for strategy- many of us could gang up against a strong player and then fight it out amongst ourselves. (Facing a much stronger opponent by yourself, you could attempt a kamikaze charge and end the round in a draw.) It required no time to set up and not much energy to play. It was short, perfect for that three minute interval between classes. It scaled well; a single desk could accommodate up to five players (and pens), and you could join adjacent desks to make more room. Most importantly, it was fun!
I didn’t have a name for it- heck, I didn’t know for sure what we were doing. Soon everyone in the classroom was playing it. Tournaments were held, and whatever advantage I possessed owing to an early start was lost. In a few months, everyone was playing better than me, and by the end of the year, people were gambling on the pens themselves. By this point I had given up on the game and taken to reading comics in class instead. (I think this marked the birth of my introversion, a characteristic that’s remained with me since.)
1998 was a different time, and I was at a different place. More boredom struck at my new school in Bangalore, and I decided to try my hand (fingers) at Penfight again. (I still didn’t have a name for it.) I caught hold of a couple of classmates and got them to play with me- and boy, did it catch on! Once again, I lost whatever advantage I possessed in a few weeks. Apparently, everyone had a better intuitive understanding of angular momentum and centers of mass than I. This time around, people started bringing in heavy duty pens to aid their cause- metal dreadnoughts, relics from bygone ages with plenty of ballast; I was well and truly out of the game.
I lost track of what happened to this phenomenon after my tenth grade. By then, I’d heard the name Penfight being tossed around. I’d lost all interest in classroom pastimes, and I’d all but forgotten about it until my cousins (who attend a different school) informed me, twelve years from the first time ever (probably) a round of penfight was played, that their school has had notices put up stating “PENFIGHT DURING SCHOOL HOURS IS BANNED”. Ha! It’s part of the high school student’s, and better yet, the school’s vocabulary now.
It’s not a hard game to cook up- any sufficiently bored enterprising schoolkid could invent something of the sort, so it is quite likely that Penfight was invented at several places around the country at roughly the same time, and that this reminiscence is one of many histories of Penfight. I’m not proud of it- partly because I don’t find it particularly clever, and partly because I’ve always been rubbish at the game.
But yeah, for the record, I (co-)invented Penfight.
If you’ve been through the farcical ordeal that is high school in the past decade, perhaps you have engaged in Penfighting. If you have, what is your Penfight story?
