Open to calligraphic challenge

SURENDRA KUMAR APHARYA from Jaipur has achieved the monumental feat of writing 1,749 characters on a grain of rice. Possibly it is worth a mention in the Guinness Book of Records. Then there is Ramagiri Swarika from Hyderabad who has written the whole Bhagavadagita — all 700 verses — on 4,042 grains of rice. As a nation, we seem to be adept at micro-writing. This must be the thinking of India’s Department of Posts.

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I recently wanted to open an account in the post office savings bank. The local post office had run out of forms and so I tried the website. I was pleasantly surprised to find not just the form that I needed but almost every form that one would need. So I downloaded and printed it and sat down to fill the form.

The first page sought the usual information — name, father’s name, address etc. Therein lies the rub. The form assumes that you, like Apharya or Swarika, are masters of micro-writing. For instance, the column for ‘name’, to be written in capital letters, is 0.4 cm in height and 4 cm wide. The email ID column has a similar size — too bad if you had to choose an unusually long ID since the usual ones were not available on Gmail!

But it gets worse. The form wants you to write your date of birth in the usual format, and in words too. And if you thought this was a mistake, it helpfully tells you that it’s mandatory. The column provided for this is 0.7 cm by 4 cm. Try writing 15-09-1978 and ‘Fifteen September Nineteen Seventy Eight’ in this column.

I tried doing all manner of calligraphic calisthenics with the form but failed. I printed another copy from the PDF with the same result. No matter how hard I tried, the information would spill into the next row and column, which then had a cascading effect through the whole form.

The post office is, of course, not the only one that has such ‘user-friendly’ forms. The nature of forms, from both private and government agencies, is always such that it is not clear how anyone is expected to fill them manually. What always surprises me is that since these forms are obviously designed by someone, did the designer actually sit down and fill the form designed by him/her? It seems unlikely.

After practising miniature writing for some time, I was able to finally fill the form. Well, almost, since there was still some spillover in various columns. Throughout this exercise, I was reminded of my grandmother who always used postcards for writing to her relatives. She used to fill every available space on the postcard with extremely small writing. I may not be in the running for Guinness glory but I could certainly be a worthy grandson!