Mohinder Singh Bhui with an 18-inch pencil at his Jamshedpur residence. Picture by Animesh Sengupta

A long piece of charcoal inside a wooden case. If it sounds like a riddle, think harder.

It’s a writing instrument that is as humble as it is indispensable. It’s the pencil.

It can also be an obsession for some, like a mechanical draftsman of Jamshedpur who had morphed into a pencil collector.

Mohinder Singh Bhui (40), employed at Indo Danish Tool Room, has more than 100 pencils of different makes, brands and countries. And now, he is eyeing the magic — and ambitious — figure of 5,000 to get into the Limca Book of Records after surpassing Inderpreet Bhatia’s collection.

As a draftsman, Bhui has been using precision pencils to make his technical drawings since 1987. Even though he now works more on computer-generated illustrations, a pencil has been integral to his life. But his interest in them as a collector was sparked while on a holiday three-and-a-half years ago.

“I had gone to attend a wedding at Rajkharsawan in Seraikela-Kharsawan in June 2008, when I chanced upon a pencil made of papier-mâché. An elderly tribal man was selling it for Rs 10. I immediately purchased it. Someone had collected waste paper, made it into a pulp, dried it and fashioned a pencil out of it, and the end result was just breath-taking,” said Bhui.

And so the collector was born.

The avid ‘pencil man’ has even arranged his collection in three categories — grades, shapes and sizes — for convenience.

Pencils can be of various types, and any collector thrives on diversity. Bhui has pencils of various thickness such as hard black (HB), hard (H) and very hard (HH), shaped as rectangles, triangles and squares and in sizes ranging from 7 to 18 inches.

Some of his prized collections include a German clutch pencil, another purchased from UK which writes only after being immersed in water and another, also from UK which is 18 inches long.

Now, even his travels have become excuses for pencil hunting.

“When I went to New Delhi, Ambala, Ludhiana and Amritsar recently, I kept hunting for pencils. My relatives and friends from across UK, USA and Germany also gift me only one thing nowadays,” laughed the collector.

He also knows reaching the 5,000 benchmark is a tough call. “It needs sustained effort and I am willing to pay price for it,” he said.

Bhui would be happy to know that there are others like him who collect pencils to record its historical development, as souvenirs — check the pencils that marked the unification of Germany or sold at William Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon, UK — or just to get a feel of social trends and fads. The American Pencil Collectors Society, established in 1958, one of the largest groups in this sphere, also displays models of log cabins, windmills, and other structures made entirely of pencils at their convention.

Do you know anybody with an unusual hobby?

Tell ttkhand@abpmail.com