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A word in hand is worth...
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In the paperless society of the future, every single word would have been gobbled up by cyberspace. Imagine not leaving behind a physical trace of our ability to write
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DYING HABIT When was the last time you actually sat down and wrote a letter to a friend? Photo: K. RAMESH BABU
A young man I know got a frantic call from his bank. "Please come here and tell us what amount you have written on the cheque," they implored him. He wondered at their strange request but the mystery was clear when he saw the cheque. Or rather, the mystery persisted. For, he found he could not decipher his own hand. He just could not make out the amount he had scrawled — neither the words nor the figure.
Let this be a lesson to all you who have neglected your writing hand. I can already picture BPO couples whose shifts don't allow them to meet, frowning at each other's scribbled notes stuck on the refrigerator. Is that "buy bread" or "pay maid"? "Love you" or "snot ball"?
They're not going to bother with pen and Post-it, these couples who live in the digital age. Email and SMS are their chosen modes. And in time to come, chips in their brains will convert their thoughts into messages that flash in front of one another's eyes.
No future?
Handwriting is on its way out. If you believe that a word in hand is worth two on the screen, you don't have much of a future to look forward to. The papers were full of "the digital lifestyle" the other day, quoting the G-man himself. He told us that students of the future would carry "tablets" to class. Well, some in India are already carrying Notebooks instead of notebooks, and virtual classrooms are not a long way off. Naughty boys pulling pigtails, chewing-gum stuck on scarred benches, witty notes passed around during a boring lecture — these shall slowly pass into anecdotal memory.
I believe in digital writing. Writing with the digits of my right hand, I mean. I write six-page letters to friends who live abroad and get them weighed and stamped at the local post office.
But dark forces are conspiring to make life ever more difficult for the letter-writer. Recently I had to send 25 invitation cards by Book Post. I settled down on the post office bench to practise the time-honoured custom of lick-tear-stick, only to discover that four-rupee stamps these days have no gum on their backs. Stamps that don't stick — what's the world coming to? I had to use the ubiquitous blue glue bottle and, as expected, there were only about six drops left!
As a letter-writer, I should salute another breed of letter-writers that existed till as recently as the 1980s (and I'm not talking of those who mail missives to the editor). They used to write letters for other people for a small fee.
You could find them sitting outside post offices, waiting to be approached by the unlettered. Let's say an old woman who couldn't read or write wanted to communicate with her son working far away. She would tell the writer what she wanted to convey and he would take it down, every personal detail, every private emotion, every joy, sorrow, problem and complaint. Today she simply has walk to the nearest STD booth.
A diminishing need
The need to hand-write is diminishing, and will no doubt vanish one day. You can draw up a whole list of writing-centred activities that will go extinct, if they haven't done so already.
Hoardings, banners and placards, even cinema posters, no longer require the strokes of a paintbrush; computers have taken over. A calligraphic pen that etches beautiful names on certificates can be replaced with a Gothic script picked from your system's array of fonts. Graphologists will go out of business, for there will be no handwriting left to analyse. What possible reason would we have, in future, to write by hand? To make a shopping list — why, you'd be shopping online. And banking online, too, so you won't need to write a cheque.
In the kiddies section of a bookshop, I came across a funny story of cows that kept their farmer awake at night by pounding out letters of request on a typewriter. If you bought the book for your child, you would have to first explain to her what this curious object is that goes click-clack.
Actually, handwriting was doomed the day the typewriter was invented and computers are merely accelerating the process. Now there is software for stenographers, too. The dots and squiggles of shorthand can be keyed in on a special keyboard and they'll be automatically converted to words on the screen.
In the paperless society of the future, every single word would have been gobbled up by cyberspace. Imagine not leaving behind a physical trace of our ability to write and speak. The rubble of our civilisation would yield only shards of plastic and broken chips.
So let's keep writing while we still can.
C.K.MEENA
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