Handwritten and heartfelt
For all the ease of typing, penmanship is a lost skill worth bemoaning
Iowe so much to wise teachers, and it has nothing to do with the subjects they were appointed to teach. Like the Hindi teacher who assured my class we would all need therapy when we were older. The chemistry teacher who introduced me to the delights of undetectable daydreaming. And the English teacher who solemnly declared as my tenth standard board examinations approached: “You will fail the exam if you do not change your illegible handwriting.” So at the age when some friends were making giant strides in calligraphy, I, instead, nudged, begged and coerced my rebellious letters into submission.
Illegibly yours
I passed the exam, but my handwriting will forever remain that troubled teenager given to sudden and inscrutable twists of mood. It was a college professor, who, in her famously sardonic manner, disabused my peers and I of the notion that a bad handwriting was a charming character trait that represented a free spirit. I learnt this the hard way, scrawling loving inscriptions on the flyleaves of secondhand books, leaving the recipients baffled. Was that
“fun” or “fern”? “Friendship” or “Freudian”? So my running hand became a running joke among friends who mockingly likened it to impressionist brushstrokes. Secretly, I wondered how to improve. And then suddenly, the art of handwriting itself became obsolete, putting an end to my misery.
I’m not sure what kids do in school these days – I imagine futuristic classrooms filled with Elon Musk holograms and infrared rays. Most of my junior academic life, however, involved a harrowed teacher scribbling notes on a blackboard, to the audio accompaniment of screeching chalk. “Now take down!” was the command as we reproduced the writing on the board in notebooks with covers featuring Sachin Tendulkar frozen in the middle of a straight drive or Hema Malini locked in an elaborate mudra.
Heart-eyes, hug, hug, kitten
When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, she left behind a bunch of love letters in stacks of brittle blue paper, tied up with twine. The language was Urdu and the handwriting, exquisite. It’s hard to replicate the urgency of new love, or even the comforts of a long friendship, digitally, unless you invent your own font. But a cartridge is simply not as evocative as an inkwell, and printouts just don’t cut it. A friend recently joked that generations later, our era’s love stories will be unearthed and published in the form of WhatsApp transcripts, littered with emojis.
Graphology, the analysis of the physical characteristics of handwriting, may well be a pseudoscience, but who here hasn’t been enchanted by its compelling interpretations? How the writing leans, how the letters behave, how lightly or boldly the pen has been used – all of this, graphologists claim, offer vital clues as to the psychological state and personality of the writer. Thankfully for those of us with dubious handwriting, the claims of graphologists are inadmissible in a court of law.
IT’S HARD TO REPLICATE THE URGENCY OF NEW LOVE, OR EVEN COMFORTS OF A LONG FRIENDSHIP, DIGITALLY, UNLESS YOU INVENT YOUR OWN FONT
Signature does not match
But they can still get you, the handwriting police, with their ceaseless demand for your “official signature”. Now this is an area fraught with tension for the terminally inconsistent. “But the signature does not match” is a regular refrain from banks and other official establishments expressly designed to undermine the free human spirit. The summer I was busy changing my handwriting, I thought it would be very grown-up of me to invent a new signature, too. Sadly, my inner consultant commanded me to write my full name as fast as I could. The result is an abstract scrawl, which I insist consists of all the letters of my name, but no one’s ever believed me. Moral of the story: When it comes to committing to a signature, speed and style are not of the essence; repeatability is.
For all the relief over the obsolescence of handwriting, it’s a loss I occasionally bemoan. I miss receiving letters and notes flaunting wildly different stationery and penmanship, with erratic punctuation and spelling errors an overzealous autocorrect won’t check. What can be more endearingly human than a loved one’s handwriting? she types wistfully.