Bad handwriting or exclusive font?
With the advent of modern technology almost all adults have no relationship with pen and paper. The tapping and clicking sounds are more familiar than the scratchy and squeaky sounds now-a-days, especially in offices. Thank God children are still learning their first letters of the alphabet on paper! No matter which part of the world you belong to, almost all of us learn our alphabet from our parents.
It is hard to find a person who was never grounded for a messy handwriting. Bengali mothers are quite classic when it comes to their children’s ugly handwriting. No matter how hard you have tried, your mother checked your copy and said, “It seems a cockroach walked on the paper with ink on its legs!” Nobody can ever beat Bengali mothers with the weapon of sarcasm.
If you had handwriting with scattered tiny fonts, your mother might scream at you saying, “What is this font? (Kaker pa, boker pa) Looks like the legs of crows and storks all over the paper!” Then there are memories when our mother used to make lines and asked to write between the lines while writing to keep lines straight.
My mother had a special one. I used to leave a big loop in small L, Y and G when she said, “stop feeding your L, Y and G so much, they are getting fat”.
Even our legends have jokes about bad handwriting. The story is like this, one day a man went to Gopal Bhar, a court jester of medieval Bengal, and requested him to write a letter for him. Gopal said, “I have serious leg injury, I cannot write.”
The surprised man said, “You will write with hand. It has nothing to do with the legs”. Gopal with a serious face said, “If I write the letter I have to go to the recipient to read it out. How will I be able to walk with a leg injury?”
See! You are not alone with messy handwriting. Think of the physicians. Who didn’t hear the joke yet? “Have bad hand writing? There are all chances you will grow up a physician.”
Did you know Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee had really bad handwriting? After he received Nobel Prize his school teacher Deepali Sengupta said in a media interview that she once summoned Abhijit’s mother to school to complain about his messy handwriting. This one is a life-saver, no?
It’s time you should be at peace with your bad handwriting on this World Handwriting Day. If anyone makes fun of your handwriting just say, “This is not bad handwriting, this is an exclusive font I discovered for myself.” Winky-wink!