I Can.
The face of my KG teacher is imprinted on my memory. Whenever I picked up my pen and scribbled using my left hand, she used to beat me in my knuckles using a scale ruler. It was a battle between a 5 year old left handed child and his narrow minded teacher. The teacher won. I started to write using my right hand.
To date, however, I could never learn to write properly. My handwriting is illegible, and I am clumsy at best when writing some thing using pen and paper. I hated exams. I struggled in school writing exams. I knew most of the stuff but couldn’t get it across to a sheet of paper. My hands get painful after I write a page or two, and after 15 minutes of writing my right hand fingers tremble. Half way through an exam, (if I was confident of getting a pass mark), I used to fold my exam paper and hand it in. The extra marks and the associated “pat in the back” were not worth the hassle!
Later on I figured out that I was left handed because of my brain configuration. There is a “right” hemisphere dominance that gives preference to my left hand. While my natural brain process was directing my left hand, my conscious brain conditioned by repeated beatings was
forcing my right hand to take the response. The apparent confusion results in a painful writing process and I have no writing skills. Despite being forced to write impositions on a four line note book over and over again, my writings never improved. I later on decided to switch over to my left hand. Guess what? I cannot write using my left hand either. For those of you who are planning on beating your children and forcing them to change hand, remember this: “the damage is irreversible”.
Worst is my drawing skills. Drawing or art is a unique form of expression. You express your feelings, emotions, and your visual images and imagination through drawing or painting. I cannot transfer my visual thoughts on to a paper using my right hand and I have lost my ability to grip the pen using my left hand.
I always wondered why there is so much of taboo about using left hand. As a child I could never figure out why I was always picking up objects and manipulating objects using my left hand. I was told that the right way to present an object is using my right hand. I made every conscious effort to use my right hand but never could succeed. I learned a strategy of switching objects the last minute from “left” to “right” hand before handing in objects. As most Indians notice only the “hand in which you handover the obj
ects” and not the “hand in which you pick up the objects”, it worked to some extent.And why is there so much fuss about using left hand? The whole idea of causing impurity or bringing in bad luck by using left hand looks ridiculous to me. If left hand is the evil hand, why don’t you chop it off, and see how you get on with your life without it?
In reality, we use both hands. 90% of the daily task you perform requires use of both hands. From the time you wash your face, wipe it off using a towel, drive a car/motor bike, get on to a bus, type, to the time you sleep ( pull the blanket over you when you sleep), you have used both your left and right hand. If left hand was to bring bad luck to you, 90% of the tasks you performed on a day to day basis should have brought bad luck to you! Only for the 10% of our daily task, we have a preference for one hand over the other. Think and try to visualize the above paragraph, you will understand. Use your “right hemisphere” for once and think about it!
After I moved to the west, my productivity improved. I don’t have to waste my brain cells in thinking about pointless task of forcing my self to use my right hand or make the last minute switch over of objects. I hand over my research reports, strategic studies, project implementation plant etc using my left hand and no one has any issues in England or North America. My left hand wasn’t that evil after all!
If left hand was evil and brought bad luck, then I wonder why god created two hands of equal length and configuration. Throughout the biological kingdom, nature prefers symmetry. Most animals have even number of limbs, and they are of equal length. Why not the lord of the universe, make the left hand slightly shorter or have lesser number of fingers than the right hand?
If food got impure because you touch it using left hand (for whatever reason), then strictly speaking we should cook using only one hand! Here is a left handed question for you.
Which hand do you use to cut vegetables?
You might say “Right hand”.
Wrong.
You use both the hands.
The difference is the hand in which you hold the knife! Still not clear. Try chopping onions using only one hand.
Is Left hand unlucky?
Think of this. In a society obsessed with using right hand, showing great prejudice to the use of left hand, I was born to my parents who had liberal thinking. My parents never ever criticized me for using left hand. Never, ever forced
me to use the “right” hand. My parents defended me when the society was putting pressure on them. What are the odds of a left handed child (a minority population) being born to such parents who were indeed rare during that era?What are the Odds of an American becoming the President of USA?
What are the Odds of a Black African American becoming the president of USA? What are the Odds of a “LEFT HANDED” African American becoming the president of USA?
The very first presidential order that Obama signed was using his left hand!
In the USA left handed people are minority (less than 12% of the total population). Yet, 6 out of the 12 presidents of the USA are left handed. What are the odds?
In the last presidential election, it was a 100% guarantee that the next President would be left handed. Both John McCain and Obama were Left handed.Do you know that two of the World’s greatest scientists Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were Left Handed? Newton was using his evil impure left hand while formulating the Theory of Gravity and Einstein was using his left hand while coming up with theory of relativity.
Bill Gates (Microsoft), the world’s richest man is Left Handed. Can we call him Icon of Bad Luck?
I can show you millions of such examples of Left handed people
with outstanding achievements. Let me list a few:
Mahathama Gandhi, Bill Clinton, Marie Curie, Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, Bill Gates, Raphael, Van Gough, Michel Angelo, Pablo Picasso, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Beethoven, etc.
Hollywood is dominated by left handed people. I won’t list them all but mention my favorite Matt Groening (including his characters Bart Simpson,
Ned Flanders and Mr. Burns!)And what is the big deal about Left handed people. Here is a theory (reference Wikipedia)
"Left-handed persons are thought to process information using a "visual simultaneous" method in which several threads can be processed simultaneously. Another way to view this is such: Suppose there were one thousand pieces of popcorn and one of them was colored blue. Right-handed people—using the linear sequential processing style—would look at the popcorn one at a time until they encountered the blue one. The left-handed person would spread out the pieces of popcorn and look at all of them to find the one that was blue. A side effect of these differing styles of processing is that right-handers need to complete one task before they can start the next. Left-handers, by contrast, are capable and comfortable switching between tasks. This seems to suggest that left-handed people have an excellent ability to multi-task, and anecdotal evidence that they are more creative may stem from this ability to multi-task"
My point is not to brag about Left handedness.
Instead to educate you, so that you will not smack your child if you see him/her use her Left hand more than his/her Right Hand.
Left Handedness is a normal trait; there is nothing abnormal or evil about this.
You don’t have to be Einstein (Left Handed) to figure this one out!
