Navya Naveli Nanda puts pen to paper

Hello from Hamburg,

I landed here on a crisp, bright September afternoon, and the first thing I noticed was the water. The canals and the harbour were everywhere, and this beautiful city was seamlessly organised around them. Driving in, I passed rows of water-facing, old red-brick warehouses, a century old and still in use, their reflections perfectly still in the canals. Even the busiest streets had a kind of quiet to them, an unhurried order that I, coming from Mumbai, am not used to. It felt like a city that takes its time getting things right, which turned out to be the theme of the trip.

A writing desk from my childhood

Like most people, I knew Montblanc first as an object before I knew it as a name. As a little girl, one of my favourite games was playing secretary to my grandfather. I’d sit at the corner of his desk with a notepad, taking very important notes that nobody would ever read while he worked. His desk was always covered in Montblanc pens: black and gold, heavy in my small hands, each one sitting exactly where he’d left it. I wasn’t allowed to borrow them, which of course made them the most fascinating things in the room. Sometimes, if I was lucky, he’d let me sign my name on his notepad with one, and I remember how smoothly the ink came out and how grownup that made me feel. I knew the white star and I knew there was a mountain somewhere in the story. I just didn’t know how much of the work was still done by hand.

Once a bookworm, always a bookworm

I’m co-writing a book right now, and I also run a book club (@dustoffyourbooks, for those who want to join), so I spend much of my life with other people’s words while trying to find my own. Some of the most moving things I’ve ever seen are handwritten. My latest obsession has been spending hours poring over scans of physicists’ notebooks: Schrödinger’s equations, Einstein’s manuscripts, a letter from Richard Feynman to his wife. What stayed with me wasn’t the science but the things crossed out, the margin notes, the places where a line of thought was abandoned and started again. A typed document never shows you that. A good pen and a good notebook don’t make you a better writer, but they make you take the act of writing seriously. In a world where everything is typed, deleted, and retyped, ink is a small commitment. Perhaps that’s what I sensed at my grandfather’s desk all those years ago.

Destination: Montblanc atelier

I was staying at Fairmont Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, the grand old hotel on the edge of the Binnenalster. Breakfast was simple: black coffee and a croissant at a table by the window. I lingered over it longer than I meant to, watching the morning settle over the lake. The water was perfectly still, a few sailboats were moored near the jetty, and the city was waking up slowly, with cyclists crossing the bridges and swans drifting past. It was one of those rare mornings where I didn’t reach for my phone. Instead, I opened my notebook and wrote a few lines about the day ahead, partly out of habit and partly because it felt like the right way to begin a day dedicated to writing instruments.

I noticed the light the moment I walked into the Montblanc atelier. The room was flooded with it, and it was quieter than I’d imagined an atelier could be, with just the soft hum of machines and the occasional tap of a tool. Everything about the space seemed designed for concentration.

What surprised me most was how many hands and how much patience went into something I’d always taken for granted. A single nib, barely the size of a fingernail, passes through around 35 separate steps before it’s ready, and then the pen goes through dozens more before it can leave the building. I watched gold being stamped into the shape of a nib under enormous pressure, then an artisan bent over her bench, grinding the tiny tip by hand and checking it again and again under a magnifier until it was perfect to her eye. Then I was shown the room that stayed with me most: a small, silent space where every finished nib is tested. The team writes with it using transparent ink and just listen, a lost art today. A good nib glides; a flawed one makes the faintest scratch, and only a trained ear can catch it. I learned that many of these artisans are trained in-house for years, because this kind of skill can’t be learned from a manual. It’s handed from one pair of hands to the next. I kept thinking about my grandfather’s desk and of how none of those pens had ever said a word about the care that went into them.

The art of the writing

I spent part of the afternoon with Nora, who has been a nib grinder at Montblanc for 25 years. A pen whisperer of sorts, she placed a pen in my hand and asked me to write my name. Then she watched, not the page but my hand: the angle at which I held it and how firmly I pressed. Within seconds she could tell me how I write and which nib would suit me best. What stayed with me was something she said almost in passing: she never knows who will hold the pens she makes, but she makes each one as if it’s for someone she loves.

I came away thinking about time: the time it takes to make something properly and the time it takes to write something worth keeping. In my own work, whether that’s investing, my foundation or the book, I always feel pushed to move faster, to decide quicker, to reply sooner. But the work I’m proudest of has never been rushed. Backing a founder means committing to years, not quarters. Building a foundation means showing up long after the launch, when nobody is watching. Writing a book means returning to the same page again and again until it says what you mean. 

Like a Montblanc writing instrument, it’s work made of many small, deliberate steps, each done with intention. I’ve been writing by hand every morning since I got back, a few lines in a notebook before I open my phone. I think I finally understand what those pens were teaching me all along: the words matter more when you take the time to put them down properly. I’m still playing secretary, I suppose. Only now, the notes are my own.