I lost

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August 23

My desk in office has a little bottle full of red Apsara pencils and yellow Staedtler ones with the red eraser tip. The yellow pencils were a gift for my birthday, around the same time last year. A set of ten, as bright as sunshine.. fresh as lemons, with that mellow woody scent. Something that pretty deserved a special place, so I put them all in a little Starbucks mocachillo bottle that I had picked up and preserved from one of the international airport cafes. So all through the last year, the pencils remained in my bottle, guarded, untouched...kept away from 'brutal sharpners', 'meddlesome borrowers' because all those who approached me asking if I had a pencil to spare, would be given a shoddier red Apsara pencil instead, while I almost always catch them eyeing the bright yellow Staedtlers.

Drifting away as usual, this blog wasn't supposed to be about my yellow pencils. It was supposed to be about the pencil nevertheless. Incidently I was reading a note the other day, what struck me so hard and so unexpected was the handwriting.. so beautiful, so meticulous the best I had even seen thus far...black pencil in a piece of ivory white paper. The strokes, familiar yet unfamiliar, I thought for a moment.. what was my handwriting like? In an instant I was possessed by this uneasy nauseating feeling, as I was just unable to remember what my handwriting was. Cursive?...straight?...scribbled..ringing a bell? Hell no. This feeling of 'not knowing' is something very peculiar. Got me thinking about the last time I actually wrote anything on paper. The one off notes on post its, travel accounts, doodles, thumbnail sketches? And that was that. I hadn't written anything in a long long long time. Coming to think of it...nothing through six years in advertising, and five years in art school before that..which made it a whopping eleven years gone without penning a single a4 sheet with words. Phew. Then I look up at the bottle full of un-sharpened yellow pencils as good as new glaring at me, and I couldn't help feeling totally, utterly foolish and ashamed.

In the journey that began when my letters turned to emails, diary to blogs, brushes to photoshop, I realised I had lost something so precious on the way- my handwriting.

my mood today:

11:56 PM | Blog it

Comments (5)

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	Ritwik Shuklawrote: ha ha ha ha........Very true….Quite a funny way of expressing a hard reality…… I am sure; my grandpa will beat me, if there is a “word per minute” output compression with the criteria of visible enough to be read by anyone else Apr. 3
	Madhuwrote: sigh I know that feeling. I sometimes wonder what happened to my handwriting - it used to be neat.. now it's all shabby and it truly worries me that we get to write less and less.. and type more and more! At this rate, we won't leave any stone inscriptions for our future generations.. just online journals! Mar. 13
	deepu paulwrote: cursive, stright, scribbling...and gone...gone with the wind as though it looks.... Sept. 10
	Arun Iyerwrote: good to see you back. i was thinking of exactly the same thing the other day when i was filling a form and i just couldn't write fast anymore. but then in a way i was glad that this had happened and technology has prevailed. i am a lot better off writing on a computer. maybe because i had nothing to lose of my handwriting :) Aug. 26
	Zofo The Wandering Hermitwrote: Reading this I realize that apart from signing a few cheques, I haven't written anything on paper since ages... Prior to the cell one could recall quite a few phone numbers off the top of the head no I have trouble remembering my own... I sometimes wonder whether technology is doing its little bitty to fossilize our brains back to the stone ages to an alarming extent.. Aug. 24

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