If you were S, what font would you be?

This is a hand-written column. ‘Hand-crafted’, if you like. Not by design but by accident — my computer crashed, and the only way I could meet the deadline was to start scribbling the whole thing out on sheets of paper.

And I’m willing to bet my motherboard this is the only hand-made article on this page, if not the entire edition.

Does that make it special? I like to believe it does. In an age where even self-proclaimed bibliophiles are turning their backs on books in favour of that monstrosity called ‘e-book’ or a Kindle, where you don’t open a book so much as access it (ugh!), I want to take my PC crashing as a cosmic sign urging me to fire a salvo for what the word ‘writing’ used to mean: making ink marks on paper using pen or pencil.

I believe we should set aside at least one day a week where we would exchange the keyboard for pen and paper.

This is the least we can do by way of tokenism at a time where ‘writing’ primarily denotes an activity that can be carried out without pen or paper or ink — something inconceivable even half a century ago, when you still needed paper for your typewriter. The only time many of us pick up a pen these days is to put our signature on some document. 

It would be naive to assume that this shift has had no impact on the way we write. Neuroscientist and author Livia Blackburne writes in her blog about a study that got people to write two reports, one on a computer and one on paper.

The writers were given all the information needed to write the reports two days in advance, and when they came for the experiment, they got three hours to write each report. According to Blackburne, the researchers used keystroke tracking and video cameras to record their progress. I must admit I was gratified to find that the results of the study confirmed all my technophobic prejudices. 

First, computer writers wrote texts that were 20% longer. Clearly, brevity is not the soul of MS Word. Secondly, the computer writers took half as much time to write the first draft than pen and paper writers. In other words, speed and greater productivity (defined in terms of word count) are the pluses of writing on a computer. It’s no coincidence that they are also the defining values of a civilisation controlled by the logic of capitalism.

Longhand, by contrast, is defined by the values of slowness and thrift — you don’t want to expend more effort (read words) in conveying something than what is strictly necessary.

As the study showed, the keyboard-tappers and the longhand writers are not two different kinds of writers so much as different aspects of the same writing self, representing divergent orientations. A novel or a poem set down on paper by a writer in his handwriting is also a singular art object and not merely a text (which is all that a doc file could be).

Writing in longhand leaves a trace in the real world — of an ‘original’. Which is why original manuscripts of celebrated novels are collector’s items, just as paintings are. A page of handwritten manuscript reflects the first deposit of thought from the writer’s mind. But that’s rarely the case with the first drafts written on a computer. According to the study cited by Blackburne, ‘computer writers made 80% of their revisions during their first draft.’

There is also an old world romance and an artisanal aspect to writing by longhand that you will never experience while typing on a keyboard. And if you happen to be writing on blank paper as opposed to ruled sheets, every page, every line, and every letter would be as distinctive as an individual crystal of ice.

For instance, the letter ‘s’ in a given font will look the same on a computer screen no matter who types it, and no matter how many times it is summoned to the page by the writer. (Of course, there are thousands of fonts out there that offer you the opportunity to showcase your individuality by borrowing a font that you had no hand in creating, which is all the more ludicrous when you consider the fact that all of us come loaded with our own ‘custom-made’ font — our handwriting.)

But in longhand, no two ‘s’es will ever be exactly the same. If there are 20,000 ‘s’es in a book you’ve written by hand, every one of them will be different from every other ‘s’ — each a unique existential sign whose form will be determined by a number of factors like your state of mind, your nervous system, your energy levels, the stiffness of your finger joints, the angle of your back, the speed of your thoughts, the letters preceding and succeeding ‘s’ in the words where it occurs, the texture of the patch of paper where your pen is going to form the shape of the letter ‘s’. All these variables and more will combine in a never-to-be-repeated-again fashion every time your hand forms an ‘s’.

Thus, each one of your ‘s’es is as extraordinary as you are, really, like the billions of other human ‘letters’, shall we say, that have gone into the writing of the script that is humanity’s history, a history that’s being ‘written’ even as you read this. The tragedy is that every ‘s’ on this page is the antithesis of the handwritten ‘s’ — a sad metaphor of what technology does to human beings in a mass industrial society.

G Sampath is an independent writer based in Delhi. He can be reached at sampath4office@gmail.com