Many of the skills which come naturally to me today are the result of my father’s well meaning tyranny during my formative years. He was obsessed with handwriting, and harangued us with this story of Mahatma Gandhi every weekend:
Gandhiji’s only regret was that he did not have good handwriting. Handwriting gets set in concrete in childhood, and cannot be changed when you become an adult. Which is why Gandhiji, who won freedom for us, could not free himself from this disability. (Yes, he called it a disability)
After this story, he dictated and we wrote; then he got a ruler to measure the relative sizes of letters, and usually awarded us poor marks with his illegible initials, which, he remarked, were illegible because if they weren’t, imposters would steal all the money from his bank.
So we grew up with a mission. On our shelves, the stack of cursive writing books grew like Shanghai Tower while champaks and comics remained modest igloos. Writing best wishes on presents and cards were our exams, and if we passed, we’d be rewarded with another cursive writing book. Naturally, I grew up with decent handwriting, and my greatest achievement so far has been penning down letters of love to my friends’ girlfriends, which required the crafts of both Spencer and Shakespeare. I did it for free, even though, in hindsight, I regret not making money out of it. I could have paid for the UPSC test series with that money.
Writing love letters for your friends’ girlfriends is a complex task. You have to lie a lot. And lie with an imagination. You have to constantly reinvent accolades because the girls usually shared their letters, and got jealous of an adjective there and a phrase there, while all boys could invoke was blue eyes hypnotize teri kardi ai menu…. So one had to ask for more personal information to manufacture for them a customized product, and I came to know so much about everybody that I had to take care not to mix things up. I vividly remember once praising a girl for her ringlets in a verse when she hadn’t any. Fortunately, both the boyfriend and the girlfriend didn’t know what it meant, so I was saved.
For research, I relied heavily on Nicholas Sparks and cousins, only to later develop a severe allergy to love stories.
But let’s get back to UPSC. Recently, I have been inspired by the handwriting of UPSC toppers, and have been trying to emulate the same.
Also, about the Gandhiji’s story- it’s total codswallop. If you have a solid foundation, you can change handwriting like clothes. Here are the examples:
So, basically, there are two broad categories of good cursive handwriting. You either stretch vertically, or you keep the words rounded. The former is speedier because your strokes are parallel to the stretch whereas the latter is more beautiful because the letters are full and clear.
I began with everybody’s favorite, the tomato shaped font, and my friends buried me in garlands of praise, their best compliments being,
“Oh my God you write like a girl!” and “I wish I could cut off your fingers with the kitchen knife. “
That girls have beautiful handwriting is true to some extent. One of my old friends who took pride in having a scientific outlook about things tried to explain this in the following way:
Girls design Rangolis, while men design rockets.
With a handwriting that he possessed, you could bet that the rocket he’d design won’t land too far.
Anyways, I joined a mains test series, and by the time I finished my first test, it was 4 hours 12 minutes and my fingers weighed two tons. I had to text Apricity with the other set of fingers for a few days.
I was also shocked to discover that losing the fingers didn’t fetch you disability points in the mains, which in my opinion is a cruel omission.
Anyways, when they returned the evaluated copy, I kept looking for the extra marks for good handwriting on the margins, but got nothing. I saw one comment, which took me three attempts to read. It said,
“Try to finish on time! “
That’s when it dawned on me- nobody except my father and Gandhiji ever gave two cents about handwriting. Which is why the chemistry teacher once awarded me a zero for writing with studded and embroidered fonts an equation that was wrong. She even drew bubbles around the zero.
I had this batchmate during graduation who used to write with rollerballs and always asked for three extra sheets. Her handwriting was modest but she wrote like she had a cyborg limb. She always wrote the assignment half an hour before the deadline, the same time it took me to design the vines and flowers on the front page.
I experimented and researched a lot. What I have figured out is there are two kinds of people
- People for whom pen does not matter
- People for whom it matters
The first category is free of this dilemma- you can give them a twig and a topaz slab and they will engrave all GSI answers in 2 hours 45 minutes.
For people belonging to the second category, pen is as critical as wands to wizards. The right wand must choose you, or the magic would fail you soon. So I began collecting pens and trying them out. I went through a range- from liquoflo to Vision elite, and assessed the pens on numerous parameters such as weight, flow, friction, girth, etc.
What I have realised so far is:
- Ball pens are useless. Throw them away.
- Gel pens feel like rubbing a sandpaper on a baby’s butt. Too much friction. Trimax is the only exception.
- Rollerball pens are better as they give you a calligrapher’s touch; but you would need regular World Bank aids to afford rollerballs.
So the jugaad comes to an aspirant’s rescue. There are two popular jugaads:
- You throw away the trimax pen, buy the ₹25 Trimax refill and write with it, thus making it nearly weightless. For grip, you can add foam grips.
- The other option is to refill the non-refillable pilot V5 using hi-techpoint ink. The ink costs ₹15 and can almost fill two V5 pens. But V5 is not waterproof and that’s the only flaw.
I am going with the second option for now. It is working fine. Now the next task is to learn to draw boxes and straight lines without a ruler.
Tough challenge.
roastedmoongfalis 