BENGALURU: One of the most interesting stories about autograph collecting is from 1932 when the Waterman Pen Company launched a major campaign to collect autographs in their special albums. More than 1,50,000 boys and girls under 16 participated. Waterman exhibited the winning albums and the top 30 entries at the 1933 Chicago World Fair and then returned them to the collectors.
There were 333 prizes, comprising 133 cash prizes (including a grand prize of $1,000), 100 Waterman Fountain Pens and 100 Waterman Mechanical Pencils. It was an interesting marketing campaign considering that you needed a pen or a pencil to take an autograph! During my teenage years (in the 1990s), I remember asking my classmates to write a message and sign an autograph on the last day of high school. Getting a celebrity autograph was almost impossible, especially if you lived in a small town, and when one of my friends got a signed photo from actor Juhi Chawla, he became the celebrity in school.
The first major celebrity autograph I received was from actor Rajinikanth, who was sitting at the next table when I went for dinner with friends at Hotel Atria in Bengaluru. I have kept an album of all the autographs I have collected from theatre stalwarts such as Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, and musicians from Jagjit Singh to Zakir Hussain. My most precious autograph book is that of the entire Indian cricket team from a charity dinner after a friendly match between India Cricket A and B teams in Bengaluru.
T.
