My signature printed on my PAN card triggered some childhood memories. As a child I was fascinated by the signatures of my teachers and parents. My father had a particularly complex and interesting signature which, needless to say, he would somehow replicate flawlessly each time. In fact, he even explained to me its constituent parts, and how all the letters in his name were represented there.
Working with a few friends, I tried to come up with a signature for myself that was stylish, sophisticated and hard-to-forge. Thus began my first attempt to create the perfect signature – almost half of my rough notebook was filled with my futile attempts to create and replicate that signature. After all, practice makes perfect. Of course, it’s a different matter that my sincere efforts were mistaken for attempts to forge my father’s signature on my report card, and I got pulled up for it.
Anyway, that did little to stop me from pursuing the project. Fascinated that I was with the professional touch my teacher’s signature exuded, the use of the red ink adding to the respect it commanded, I continued to experiment and try out different formats. I tried out some that constituted just my initials, part of my name.
I also toyed with some “artistic” formats, deriving inspiration from my father’s signature. And of course, the “finishing touch” of underlining your signature with a curved line and two dots was in vogue back then. All the while, I dreamt of signing some kid’s course work one day in red ink, with complete powers to dole out as many “stars” as I thought fit!
Soon, it was time to finalise one: the signature was to appear on all those important application forms for public examinations and a huge bunch of entrance tests, and it was very important that it be reproducible by me, in the same form.
So, half-heartedly I settled for a relatively simple one, that I was convinced was both unique and replicable. I use it to this day, though I can’t quite remember always the style and shape of a few of the letters. This should explain why a cheque I issued was recently returned for the reason, “signature mismatch”.
Of course, many transactions that previously mandated a hand-written, pen-based signatures can be handled otherwise now. Many of them can be done online: there are e-cheques, Internet-based bill payments and even e-filing of income tax returns. There are also various online verification mechanisms. Salary certificates and Form 16 statements are routinely signed digitally. Gone are the days when one had to manually sign those declarations, indicating the place and date.
All this gets me wondering whether we would live to see a day when the signature was just a thing of the past. Also, how would mark sheets be graded then? Would we just have questions, whose answers can be fed into and read by a machine? Will score cards just be e-mailed to parents, obviating the need for their manual signatures at all?
In short, have all my efforts been in vain?
(sindhujar24@gmail.com)
