The vanishing skill of handwriting!

Back then, we dealt in sweeping generalizations! If someone had a bad handwriting, we were sure he would be a doctor! The doctor’s proverbial scribble while prescribing medication was well known. And if someone could decipher that handwriting, he would be a pharmacist! It was a miracle that the pharmacist handed out the correct medicine, for the prescription was totally illegible!

Teachers pulled you up if the handwriting was bad. “Your handwriting is like your head-writing!” they scolded, as if destiny’s reading was easier than this gibberish! The first-ranker in class invariably had a beautiful handwriting. His proficiency was a nuisance since he showed the rest of us in bad light! Any time, you brought home the first-ranker’s notebook, comparisons were inevitable. “Look at his handwriting! They are like pearls!”

Handwriting was a skill you worked on from the beginning. Initially, you went through the drill to write one letter at a time, and then, moved to “running-hand”. These days, the nomenclature has changed. “Running-hand” is replaced with the Americanized term called “cursive-writing”. A “running-hand” gave you speed- a critical need for the old-style exams. Invariably, there were outliers, who never took to running-hand. They continued to write in “print letters” all through life, and still managed to clear exams. “Lefties” had a different writing style. Their elbow was bent and came around the paper, and the wrist was cocked, as they chiseled away with their pens! Some stuck their tongue out or babbled away involuntarily, as their writing hand kept pace with the mouth! Writers came in all flavors at school.

It is ironical that a skill so fundamental as this, is on the brink of extinction. Some of us have not written for ages. Signing a bank-cheque makes us nervous. The hands tremble as the pen is brought to paper. It requires several trials on scrap paper before the cheque is signed! A week later, the cheque is back with us, with a blunt note that the signature does not match! The helplessness is acute, as if we need to go to kindergarten all over again.

The question is- does handwriting have a place in tomorrow’s world? It is amply clear that the future is typing- whether it is on the cellphone or the laptop. That said, wouldn’t it be more worthwhile to replace the writing drills in school with typing exercises?

Going forward, no one is going to sign a bank-cheque. “Bio-metric” security and its ilk will take care of that. It took us decades to go from thumbprint to a reasonable percentage of writing-literacy. And now, with bio-metric, we are back to thumbprint all over again! Life has come a full circle!