Penmanship is not particularly celebrated any more given that the world now is so accustomed to keyboards, both virtual and real. I used to have fairly good penmanship before 1981 but after I became a journalist, first the typewriter and then the PC gradually destroyed it. So enslaved I am to the keyboard that I can no longer write more than a sentence or two in longhand. Lately, I have been trying to revive penmanship via a different route. I paint words rather than write them.
So this morning while clearing many old boxes retrieved from a vacated storage unit I found some perforated pages from my late father Manharray's diary dating back to nearly sixty years. He died in 1970 when I was nine. The two enduring attributes of his that I remember are his fine penmanship and his voracious reading habit. In the diary pages that I have shown here are dated August 6, 1963, when I was barely two. He has taken down some notes about subjects such as muscles, sleep and bicycle.
"Sleep is psychologically described as a kind of idling of the body mechanism; muscles relax, body temperature and the blood pressure drop. The brain waves--tiny electrical impulses that the highest nerves control, the cortex itself closes down its million tiny circuits like the switchboard going dark for the night. Our plain of consciousness sinks low," Manharray writes.
About the human heart, he notes, "Heart is simply (a) rugged pump which can be studied like any other pump. And when necessary can be surgically repaired."
I found that ironic because he died after a fourth heart attack, having been paralyzed on the left side of his body by one of them at a very young age. He died at 42. Evidently, his heart could not be surgically repaired even though the congenital condition--mitral stenosis--that he had is now easily fixed.
Coming back to his voracious reading, Manharray used to read all kinds of books and other materials. For instance, he was an obsessive reader of the National Geographic which in the Ahmedabad of the 1960s used to be available as severely backdated issues. I knew of the National Geographic as a boy under ten, courtesy of my father.
Interestingly, my uncle, Bhaskarray, my father's younger brother, also possessed excellent penmanship.
Incidentally, father's diary pages measure five inches by three inches with lines less than a quarter inches apart. It strikes me that there are no corrections as in scratching out words for reasons of misspelling or otherwise.
And to think that we live in an era where we say ELI5 for explain like I am five and BRB for be right back, not to mention the now dated LoL or LMAO or ROFL.