Hyderabad: All is not ‘right’ for left-handed people across the globe. Isha Singh, a four-year-old left-handed child in Mumbai came back from school crying because she couldn’t sharpen her pencil as comfortably as her fellow students. Her mother Shweta immediately wrote to Hindustan Pencils Pvt Ltd, the manufacturers of Natraj and Apsara pencils, explaining that ‘it is difficult for a four-year-old leftie to use a regular sharpener, and left-handed stationery online is very expensive costing about Rs 700 to Rs 1,200.”
The letter went viral on social media with more than 6,000 shares and was liked more than 15,000 times. Shweta immediately got a call from the company asking for details of Isha’s experience and promises of help. “In a regular sharpener, the blade is towards the right and the movement is clockwise and it is difficult for a four-year-old to rotate her left hand clockwise. It is easier to rotate it anti-clockwise. Therefore, if the blade was towards the left, it would help the child better,” Shweta Singh told Deccan Chronicle. She said most books and stationery items are designed for right-handed children.
On Thursday, Shweta received a letter from Sanjay Tiwari, the group marketing manager of Hindustan Pencils Pvt Ltd. He had enclosed five sharpeners. The letter read, ‘Although we do not have regular production of left-handed sharpeners, we are sending these exclusively made five units of sharpeners. Hope your child will enjoy sharpening her favourite pencils with these. We are working on its regular production.’
“I thank the company for their lovely customer service. The company made the effort and specially designed the sharpener for my kid. While writing in a notebook, Isha tends to write from right to left, like Urdu is written, and it took a lot of training to get her to write the other way round. With all these daily struggles, this has definitely been a boon,” Shweta Singh said.
There are other problems that left-handed students face every day. Avinash Kumar, a BCom student, says, “It is so simple to overlook, but every chair in an examination hall has the flip board on the right side, which makes it difficult for us to write. We also have to take care not to erase what we are writing when we write on a blackboard with our hands. Lefties need to get ‘used’ to normal stationery as it is not made for them.”
Scissors are another problem. They are designed with a grip on the right hand side that hurts if you are left handed. Sandeep Vishnoi is the founder of Indian Left-Hander Club. He says a right-hand dominated world makes it tough for left-handers but this is not understood in our country. “More awareness is needed. Spiral books are also on the list of stationery items that left handed people find difficult to manage as it hurts the hands. But the hardest stationery item to use is scissors,” he says. If there’s more awareness about this problem, more items for use by left handed people would be produced and this would bring down costs, he added.
