Handwritten ….

It must have been the book – Landour Days by Ruskin Bond – I’m reading now that prompted me to post this. I have not written (in its literal sense) beyond a few words, over the past few years. In fact I guess the last time I wrote a full page was during the examinations in my final undergraduate year!

A collection of journal entries, that Landour Days is, one of the entries talks about handwriting. Ruskin Bond himself being a staunch believer of handwritten books, talks about handwritings of some famous personalities and how handwritten books or novels have started to get rejected by publishers paving way to its near, if not total, extinction. I remember those days in the early years of school when teachers insisted on writing on a four-lined book, just to improve the handwriting. Although I must admit I have not been able to pick up as much finesse as I would have wanted to, when I look around in my office and watch some people scribble on the white boards, it does make me satisfied with what I have “achieved” out of those four-lined notebooks.

Having said that I do occasionally “scribble” an entry or two in a book just to be in touch with this wonderful art of writing. My speed has dramatically come down over the past few years and I guess the main reason to prefer a keyboard to a pen, these days, is the fact that my writing cannot keep up with the train of thoughts.

Children today are born with a keyboard in their hands. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are taught the alphabets in English as QWERTY… and not ABCDEF…. With tools such as Microsoft Word coming to their aid with spellings and grammar, the importance of writing has come down drastically. Gifting somebody a pen is no longer the fashion of the era, although I would still cherish a nice pen-set as a gift.

This happened a few months back. The token for suggesting a gift for a friend fell on me. As innocent and “old-fashioned” as I must have been, I came up with the idea of an expensive pen as the gift. And suddenly I found myself faced with brutal opposition from all sides. The cheapest of an elegant pen-set costs almost as much as an iPhone! So why not buy that instead of a pen was the counter argument. Well, I didn’t have an answer to that, since I myself used the notepad on an iPhone more!

I respect those men and women with a great handwriting. To develop a good handwriting is like learning an art and to maintain it is an achievement in itself!