Lead or Graphite

Me and my wife arrived at the Bangalore airport to proceed to the trek.

We had one trekking backpack and one small handbag each. We checked-in the trekking bag and proceeded for security check. Our handbags had barely anything. Just power-banks and wallets.

Our bags got flagged and the guy showed the x-ray and said there are buttons or something like that inside the bag. It was Swaroopa’s handbag.

I opened the outer zip to find a box which had slender long black pieces of something. I have never seen anything like that in my life and I wondered what they were. I called Swaru to explain what this damn thing is.

She came calmly and said it’s Lead. It’s to draw. The guy touched it and his fingers were all black.

He took a piece of it and put it on a paper and inserted it into some machine. May be the machine tests for presence of cocaine or something.

The machine showed the result (I guess there wasn’t any traces or cocaine). He came back and asked me, “is it Lead or Graphite?”.

I got so irritated. First of all, I don’t know why Swaroopa is carrying this on a trek. Secondly he is asking me if it’s lead or graphite and I don’t know the difference b/w the two. I told Swaroopa, please answer.

She politely said “it’s to sketch or draw bhaiya, you can also try”. The guy scribbled with it on a piece of paper. It left a black thick mark. He gave a look and told me to take it away. Guess he was irritated that his hands got dirty in all this nonsense. I quickly packed it and got away.

Once the security check was done, my mind was racing and I had a million questions in my head.

I tried to calm down and asked Swaru, “Why would you carry this on a trek”. She said “to sketch or something”.

I don’t understand explanations when they end with “or something.”

I asked her, “why would you carry raw graphite and not a normal pencil?” She said, “why would I not carry?”

When you answer a question with another question it makes the second answer really difficult.

I said “cause you get caught at security checks”. She said “that guy doesn’t know that people carry graphite rather than pencil. Now he knows”.

Though I had ten more questions like “why would you buy something like this in the first place”, “where will u sketch in a trek”, “what is the diff b/w a pencil and this”, “have u used it before, if yes show me the sketches, if no, why”, I just kept quiet.

I still don’t know the answers to the questions above. I still don’t know what that black thing really is. Lead or graphite or charcoal.

However, I know the answer to one last question that was lingering in my head.

What is the difference b/w lead and graphite. Thanks to Google.

The key difference between graphite and lead is that graphite is nontoxic and highly stable, whereas lead is toxic and unstable. Graphite and lead are very useful in the manufacture of pencils. In the past, pencils were made with lead, but modern pencils do not have lead at all.