A Fate to Fade...

Barring that illegible doctor’s scrawl in the prescription, I can’t think of too many handwritings I get to see these days.

Save perhaps my Mum’s printed handwriting in one of her letters.

Or hastily scribbled forms.

Or neatly signed cheques.

But such cases are less and far in between.

Of course there was the much-publicized hand-written letter by Barrack Obama in May this year, to the openly gayelle army soldier in Missouri, pledging the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) law. But then, such letters fall again in the category of exception than the general rule.

After all, who does handwrite letters anymore today, you’d think?

Some years back though, the scene was quite different. At any given moment of time, when a person would be stepping out of his house, his mental check-list would have looked somewhat like this:

Home keys – check
Car keys – check
Phone (if he had one) – check
Wallet – check
Pen – check

As compared to now, where the last item invariably sees an unceremonious knock-off.

Even kids these days, would possibly raise their eyebrows questioningly in a ‘you-don’t-really-mean-that, do-you?’ stare if you were to even suggest a module in cursive writing.

In all fairness, I don’t blame them - writing could indeed be messy and time-consuming, as compared to the easier texting on a mobile phone or shooting off a few sentences in a snap of a finger (for which we have the World Wide Web to thank)). No smudging, no dipping fountain-pen-in-ink routine, no looking for pencil sharpeners / erasers, heck - not even rummaging the drawer for a refill!

And now with technologies like fingerless gloves and electrical pattern-recognized algorithms being discussed as future realities, the art of handwriting looks set to fizzle out completely.

It is poignant – this ebbing, fading trend, a trend on its way to a definite extinction…

Especially for the school / college same girl who would use pens of all makes and colors to pen down her thoughts in her distinctive, loopy handwriting, doing-up her ‘i’s’ in fancy little circles, and who has now resorted to the more ‘convenient,’ no-fuss texting in getting a thought across as quickly as possible...

As usual practicality prevails over the channel adopted…