Random Ramblings of a Reluctant Blogger

The other day news filtered in through the social media about a professor in Guntur who was awarded for best handwriting.

Now, it is not the sort of thing which would have an effect on me but it did and thanks to the enterprising administrator of my school WhatsApp group.

He posted the news and let the cat among the pigeons saying let’s all share a sample of our handwriting to see how good we still are. He was good as the accompanied example showed. Soon many joined in the fun and I watched from the sidelines.

I have terrible handwriting and naturally was reluctant to send any sample as more and more joined in the good fun. Each script as good as the other. After a lot of cajoling I too sent in a small sample. The fun ended!. Not sure how many were able to decipher what I had written.

The problem with my handwriting stems from lack of coordination. My mind races, as it were in a Ferrari, and my hands, riding on a bicycle, fail to keep up with it. The result is an untidy clutter.

One thing I know for certain is that my indecipherable writing is not hereditary. My mother had a beautiful longhand and my father, though not as good, was legible. One of my sisters inherited my mother’s script while the other went after my father. And I took the lowest possible road.

If I remember right, my struggles started with cursive writing. A curse as it were. As long as I had to stick to the dotted lines in the exercise book it was fine. But it never transferred on to the notebook, even more so on the plain notebooks. There my lines would start in Gujarat and end up in Kanyakumari!

That apart the alphabets would jumble. The result, a hotchpotch of cursive, caps and lowercase letters all in one word. Many efforts by my mother, including the customary knock on the knuckles, failed to make a headway. Finally, aware of my mind-hand non-coordination, she offered me a tip to be readable at least during exams. I was to write the answers I knew well, real, real slow. It did help. However, the first few answers on the sheets would be just about fine and later ones a big jigsaw puzzle. (An aside, here I doff my hat to all the teachers who have an insane ability to decipher what those like me have written, day in day out. I salute them).

My struggles continued through my college. And there my enterprise saw me invent my own shorthand, something Pitman would be proud of, at least while jotting down the lectures. Sadly, I couldn’t use them in my answer sheets.

Later on the typewriter came to my rescue and my calligraphy was never tested.

That does not mean I never tried improving. One of my journalist colleagues once confronted me about my lettering. Naturally she had a good hand. I took up the challenge and promised to write her a letter in a perfectly good script. A month was what I needed. A month-long painstaking effort through cursive writing help books and a humongous hours of practice, I did deliver, much to my friend’s pleasant surprise (A strict non-disclosure agreement stops me from revealing the contents).

But with the typewriter at my command, my further calligraphy efforts remained on paper. The result, I was, and am, as bad as I had started. In fact there are moments when I have failed to decrypt my own ideas that I scribbled on the notebook for use later. 

Now with newer technology like voice typing and all, chirography is least of my concern. 

Unless, of course my friends, with time on their hands, want to spend it decoding my penmanship.!