My apologies to my hands and fingers..

Is Handwriting – as an art, as a skill, as a science – dying?

I am worried... the great skill that the humankind acquired, that developed as an art, that metamorphosed into a skill, that was studied closely as a science ...that enabled warehousing the knowledge and wisdom of centuries... appears to be under treatment in the ICU.. !!

When someone asked “why should we bother whether handwriting is good or bad, because the future generation will never write, they will use a keyboard or use voice recorders......” I had no answers.. Posterity will be the judge!

Down the memory lane, I recall how many days I spent on working on the cursive writing note books, how many months I was asked to write one page of English and one pager of Regional language to improve the quality of my handwriting...

Learnt about calligraphy.. the articulation of letters and words through creative and aesthetic faculties of mind..

Learnt speed writing – at some point was able to write at least twenty pages and more during an hour.

Learnt the forensics of handwriting.. to see the criminals hiding behind those letters..

Heard people explaining how the handwriting helped in

` Improving soft motor skills

   Enabling creative thinking

   Firing the intuitive capabilities of the mind

   Eye-mind-hand coordination

   

   encouraging my decision making skills

-     

       Projecting my persona through my hand !!

“Well friend, the old order gives rise to the new” my friend tried to console me..

I see the handwriting as a part of the evolution of the human culture, as the ambassador of our thinking skills, as a synergetic force of our cognitive, affective and psycho-motor experiences... and much more..

How can l let this culture of handwriting vanish in just a decade?

“the moving finger writes.. and having writ moves on...” the words of Omar Khayyam carry a world of insightful meaning..

Thanks to technology.. It has made our job easy.. I don’t have to think about the quality of my handwriting. . I manipulate the font, the size, the style, .. further I don’t have to worry about the spellings, the grammar...

But then.. Will the future generation will only read the post mortem report of this art, this skill, the science and the culture of a great evolution of human mind– called handwriting?

I have a serious question -- whether i would be able to type on the laptop with the same emotions as I wrote with my hand? or I will learn that faculty of human mind also over another decade? I have no answers..

What are we losing and what cost??????

(Well, pardon me, I have just printed this on my laptop, because my hands which wrote nearly forty pages a day about two decades before, feel shy to do the same thing today, in the company of my techno-savvy friends for the fear of being seen as an outcast!)

My apologies.. to my hands... !!