Talk of a new ElectroPen makes one wonder how many of us use pens/pencils in our everyday lives. We message, we mail, we WhatsApp, we do as many variations of this as there are apps, but we rarely put pen to paper. Lists, notes, letters, greetings — all those personal things that once had us reaching for a pen no longer require this old-fashioned way of doing things.
Suddenly we realise that we cannot recognise the handwriting of any of the friends we have made in the past decade or so because we have never seen it — and we have more or less forgotten the handwriting of older friends who once used snail mail to stay in touch. We don’t see envelopes addressed by them, we don’t receive letters or cards from them, they don’t write down directions for us when we plan to visit them — all we have is impersonal typing that appears on our phone screen or our e-mail or that disembodied GPS voice that tells us where to turn and when.
Our parents prided themselves on their handwriting, learned under threat of a cane wielded by their English teachers during the British Raj, and they made sure that they passed on those lessons to us. We three children thankfully never experienced those canes since we were home-schooled in our early years: Subject to the even-tempered, patient instruction of our mother, who guided our pencils and doubled as teacher and content creator in a green-trellised verandah that was our first classroom.
We may have allowed our handwriting to slide into indecipherability once we were out of Mother’s hands. However, if we had not had strict, no-nonsense teachers in school. If any of us presented a paper with what was termed ‘chicken’s scratches’, we had to pay the price.
More or less similar handwriting
It was back to basic formation of letters within four lines, and we slunk around, seniors in high school, doing this mandatory ‘pattern writing’ from a book meant for a five or six-year-old. And we were not released from that insult to our maturity until our penmanship was up to the mark.
The result was that most of us — not only in the family, but in the classroom — had a more or less similar handwriting: The stamp of our school, with minor adjustments for personal traits. Many of us approached calligraphic perfection: Our handwriting sometimes so uniform and well-rounded that it was almost annoying to read. Of course, there were a few with just the right amount of wavering to justify a couple more sessions with those ‘pattern writing’ books, and then there were the odd ones out: Those who had not buckled under dire threats and continued with their individualistic scrawls.
No teacher wanted to read their papers and we students never borrowed their note books when we missed lessons in school!
They must surely have welcomed the advent of the typed word!
Nostalgia hits us now as we recall how we waited for letters from our family and friends. When we had a bunch of them at one go, it was easy to sort them out by their handwriting and then read them in order of personal preference. Some quickly and matter-of-factly and others saved for when we were lying under the covers and away from prying eyes. It was not uncommon to fill 20 pages with all we had to say. And it was also not unusual to both write and read those letters in instalments ...
How little time we have for this ‘For your eyes only’ writing now! We stay connected in different ways — but that personal touch is missing. And so is that extra bit of ‘insider’ knowledge of loved ones whose handwriting we now cannot recognise or pick out eagerly.
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
