Writing on the wall for calligraphy

CHENNAI: Technology often does more good than harm, but with calligraphy it has clearly done more harm than good. Calligraphy, which once used to be an important visual art, has now been reduced to a rarely-practised art form with the easy availability of fancy fonts online.“These days people don’t have the time for anything. Calligraphy is an art and can be learned only when one has a decent handwriting. So at Thapasiya School of Arts, Anna Nagar, I conduct training programmes for handwriting improvement. Since it is an art, it has to come from within and cannot be forced,” says Lavanya, a part-time calligraphist at Thapasiya School of Arts. What prompted her to learn calligraphy were the hoardings in the city which had letters written in unimaginable but enticing ways. Shantharam K Shenoy, who works in the IT sector, fell in love with calligraphy when he first saw Alif Laila written in Urdu (A TV series based on The Arabian Nights) on DD1. “I have always wanted to master the art of calligraphy but never found time. Only recently did I pick up a few pen nibs and begin experimenting. In a matter of months, I have been able to regulate the flow of ink,” he says. “We are not taking any initiative to preserve a precious art form that has been passed on to us by our ancestors. Calligraphy will soon vanish.”Sneha Jain, who is a part-time calligraphist at the Arc For Talent institute in Chindadripet, says, “People have now started taking the easy way out. The fancy fonts that complicated pen nibs usually give can easily be downloaded and used. Even greeting and wedding cards, which usually rely heavily on calligraphy, are being done using computer-generated fonts. It’s only on rare occasions that people take the trouble of using calligraphy pen nibs. The first step in calligraphy is good handwriting. One should learn how to write in a good way, only then can he/she take the next step.”