A Lost Art and a Tag

The tag, this time, is about hand-writing. Most of the writing I do these days (and it has been that way for several years now) is, in fact, typing that I do on a computer. The only times I put pen to paper are when I have to sign my name somewhere or to note down an address or telephone number and, in rare instances, to scribble down something of importance. The keyword here is 'scribble', as against 'write'.

It was not always like that, of course, and has been the case for the past 6-7 years only.

When I started going to school, at the age of four, I learnt to write the English and Hindi alphabet. This was because we lived, at that time, at Hardwar in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Punjabi, which I spoke at home with my family, was not taught at school. A few years later, my father bought me a Punjabi qaida i.e. a book containing the Gurmukhi alphabet along with pictures of objects that I could associate with the various letters. Thus, I learnt to read most of and to write a little bit of my native language. This came in handy when we moved to Chandigarh, while I was in the ninth standard, where I had to take up Punjabi as one of the subjects at school. The alphabet of the fourth language that I know (and which, once again, I can read most of, but write and speak only a little bit of) i.e. Urdu, was learnt from the Maulvi saaheb of a nearby mosque (in the National Capital Region of India, where I now live), who very kindly consented to give me lessons at home, while I was unemployed for an extended period of time, after completing my post-graduation.

By virtue of having learnt the Urdu alphabet, I can also manage to read Punjabi written in Shahmukhi, though I can hardly write anything in that script.

My hand-writing in all four languages has always been poor. The foremost reason for this, I believe, is inborn talent!

My father did get me a few join-the-dots kind of exercise-books, while I was quite young, in order to teach me cursive writing in English. However, the cursive writing had deteriorated to a scrawl within a few years, as the pressure for completing assignments and examination papers within specific periods of time continued to increase. Even then, more often than not, I could not manage to attempt all questions in examinations, simply because I could not manage to write all the answers down within the stipulated time limits. I would give full marks to the examiners though, who managed to decipher my almost illegible hand and to award grades quite judiciously!

During the three years that I was an undergraduate, I would hardly put pen to paper for the first ten months of an academic year, apart from the few words here and there that I would jot down in the name of taking notes in class. By the end of it, it would usually turn out that I could not make any sense of any of those and would get photocopies made of others' notes. During the next two months, I could be seen writing those down over and over again, besides what I had learnt from my text books, in order to be able to memorise it all, so that I could regurgitate sufficient amounts during the examination.

For the two years that I was pursuing my post-graduate degree, I had to submit a lot of hand-written assignments and case-studies. I tried to write as clearly as I could and even used inks of different colours to write important portions of text, so as to highlight those. I have not preserved any of the material, or else I would definitely have posted some samples here. I have probably never put in so much effort at writing by hand at any other point of time in my life, as I did while writing those papers.

Since then, it has mostly been typing rather than writing that I have been doing.