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Saturday, October 15, 2005

Wrongfully Left In a Righteous World

Left Hand
Many Windows versions ago, I discovered that the mouse settings could also be modified for left handed users. Otherwise the world in its rightful righteousness ignored the needs of us lefties.

I would have become a complete righty and I owe it to my kindergarten teacher who vetoed the stupid idea, which a neighbourhood aunt had put in my mother's mind - to enclose my left hand in a sock, so that I'm discouraged from using it. There are a lot of negative attitudes towards the left hand, especially in a culture like ours, where the prime importance of the left hand is cleaning up at the end of the digestive process.

Emulating others as a kid, especially in sports made me opt for right handed play. And I never excelled in any, though I played quite a many. Bowling right-arm-over-the-wicket didn't fetch me as many scalps which my natural tendency for left-arm-around-the-wicket action would perhaps had. Where ever I go, what ever I do I find everything designed for people with a more dominant left brain. Even the damn potato-peeler is angled to suit a right-hander and also those scissors. I trained myself in using right-handed scissors, but simply can't peel potatoes with any other hand but my left.

The conflict between my inner left inclined self and the rightist world outside made me an oxymoron of sorts. Not always is the right right for me. I write with my left but throw darts using the right. This is reminiscent of the phenomenon of dominant cultures gobbling up the little ones.

And the left-handed option on the mouse is also useless, I have become so attuned with the existing scheme of things that any modifications will only be accompanied by loss in efficiency. Anyway, all mouse trays are to the right.

"If the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body, and the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body, then left-handed people must be the only ones in their right minds."

~ W.C. Fields

8 Comments:

Anonymous said...

But from where I am from, it is considered that lefties are extremely talented and my father even wanted em learn to use though to no avail. Amitabh Bachan is a leftie and my pops is a great amitabh fan, he even named me Anthony.. ahemm.
but yeah lefties are often talented. known to have great Aim as well and makes good bowlers, one of my cousins is. I don't know about u though LOL.

dwaipayan said...

i think u were dying to read tony's comment. but r u talented?????
anyways, there's even a lefthanders day(i'll tell u the daye later.)
and doesnt the quatation at the end also implies that aal right handed people are leftists????

Gypsy said...

hey, all smart guys in my class in school were lefties and i was crazy determined to be a lefty myself for some time...after a lot of efforts i can write (hardly legible) with left now...hehe, but wat the heck, im just an ordinary right handed after all!!!

Abaniko said...

i'm left-handed too. i do everything with my left hand except clicking the mouse.

thalassa_mikra said...

When I went out for my first date with my boyfriend, I noticed that he held his spoon in his left hand. I casually said "Oh you are left handed", and he dropped his spoon and mumbled, "No, yes, er..yes, does that bother you?". Funny, he comes from a nation with no left hander taboos, and yet he thought I might be prejudiced.

Indians have it better than most East Asians, where special effort is made to force a left handed kid to switch over to his right hand.

Anonymous said...

I hate lefties....(I mean those so called Indian Marxist). Meanwhile, a piece of (dis)information -- Mahatma Ghandhi could use both his hands to clean up at the end of the digestive process!

Anonymous said...

Why partial feeds? Why not full feeds as earlier?

Soumyadip said...

Goyal No the feeds are still full, only that the post in question was partial and linked to an older one (for the full version). A slight discomfort that you might face with posts under the category/label 'Post for the Past'