The Return Of Handwriting

Recent studies by experts attest to the therapeutic effects of writing by hand—it helps people improve their mental health and also connect more deeply with others

- Sonali Acharjee

Putting pen to paper. There may come a time when complete bewilderment may greet that idiom, and only if you went looking for it in the archaic section of a modern online dictionary. Pen and paper, of course, could themselves become relics of another era, evoking nothing more than a strange curiosity about how people reproduced text before the age of the keyboard.

Many have pronounced the death of handwriting, both the art and the act, but some are trying to keep it alive. Pooja Dubey is doing so in Mumbai with calligraphy, and Bengaluru-based Rohini Kejriwal is reviving two forgotten traditions— letter-writing and pen pals—simultaneously. Dubey, 30, runs The Write House, a boutique handwriting and calligraphy brand. From birthdays to festivals, poems on glass bottles to wedding vows on handmade paper, she has had hundreds of clients requesting handwritten letters in different calligraphic styles, the demand for which, she says, is only rising.

Kejriwal, 32, was curating Alipore Post, an online newsletter, when in 2020 she decided to start Chitthi Exchange, a pen pal project that saw 1,200 people signing up in the first round itself. There have been some 10 rounds since. In fact, Kejriwal’s bond with her own pen pal is still going strong, and after over 20 years of writing to each other, she attended her friend’s wedding recently.