Writing Woes
by Vijai Pant
No, no, you’ve
got the title wrong. Nothing to do with good
writing skills, but everything to do with
rounding the ‘g’, dotting the ‘i’,
striking the ‘t’- yes, a legible,
beautiful, impressive handwriting. Oh God! I can
give my right hand away (even though I’m not
a leftie) to acquire, what in school parlance is
called, ‘a beautiful cursive hand’.
All of us, who
are into this writing business, but do not fall
into the writers' category, as there is not much
to show in the form of published material, can
never get tired of expressing our gratitude, over
and over again, to the cumbersome typewriters of
yore, and the sleek computers of today with the
neat typescript conveniently hiding our terrible
hand. But there is a catch. If we scribble our
thoughts on paper and leave it at that for long,
we discover that the scribbled thoughts on paper
too have an expiry date.
Many-a-times
it has happened that I have peered closely at a
sentence on the draft some days later after the
ideas had got crystallized and had found myself
unsuccessfully trying to make sense of what at
the time of formation was an appealing sentence.
The tantalizingly unclear words suddenly make the
keyboard go silent for a good minute or so. The
mystery of the sentence only gets resolved by
substituting it with another, and, probably, an
inferior one, if we happen to believe the adage,
‘first thoughts are best’.
But I wonder
why most organizations still insist on
handwritten applications for job seekers. Do they
want to expose our clan- ‘the masters of the
spidery scrawl’- though the reason can well
be that handwriting tells about one’s
personality?
However, there
might not be much to tell by way of the writer’s
personality- that lost soul whose mind keeps on
drifting to the complexities of his/her next plot.
However, with an abundance of ideas filling the
head, it is increasingly being felt that a paper-pen
combo is indispensable for the writer. Who knows
when inspiration may strike? The fertile
imagination must find its way promptly on paper
and, for the illegible ones, equally promptly on
the keys.
At the same
time, as I look back, I also derive a lot of
satisfaction from the encouraging fact that most
of my language teachers had impeccable English,
but atrocious writing. Enough reason to delude
myself into believing that their legacy is just
being carried forward by me.
Now let me
assure all those who suffer from ‘writing
woes’ that, like every cloud has a silver
lining, there’s a brighter side to this 'handicap',
if one is inclined to call it so. The advantage
is that our employers will never task us with any
extra work, which needs a good artistic hand.
The tedious
filling up of parents’ names and addresses
of the students of my class (of which I’m
the class teacher) in the invites for the coming
Sports Day at school has again been given to that
colleague of mine with a fantastic hand, while I
continue to save my time and energy to establish
myself as a writer.
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