Mouse on Paintbrush

Prof. D D Trivedi was a senior visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad.  In 1998, I was assisting him in a course on Finance, which mostly dealt with management of working capital.  Since Prof. Trivedi was not very conversant with computers, he used to write the contents for his presentations and give it to me one day in advance and I used to prepare the presentation using PowerPoint.  Prof. Trivedi was about to engage a session for the executives attending a Management Development Programme.  As usual he wrote the contents of his presentation in slips of papers and handed over to me the previous day.  As I was flipping through, I was surprised to see a Sanskrit Shloka written on the last slip.  I asked Prof. Trivedi:

‘Sir, do you want this shloka on the presentation?’

‘Yes’

‘Can I type this shloka in English?’

‘No, I want it in Devanagari script itself’

‘But how do I type Devanagari in PowerPoint?’

‘I don’t know, I want this in my presentation tomorrow. If you don’t know, ask someone who knows and get it done’.

Saying this, Prof. Trivedi walked away.  I stood there without knowing what to do.  (Forget Google Transliteration, it was early 1998 - Google itself was not born!  Today we can do it in a jiffy).  So, I asked a friend who was good at computers.  He told me to write the shloka using a sketch pen on a white sheet, get it scanned and paste it to the presentation.  There was only one scanner in the entire campus, which was kept in the computer lab.  When I reached the computer lab, to my ill luck, the manager told me that the scanner was not in working condition.  My friend suggested another way out.  Though not easy, I decided to try that.

I went to the computer lab and opened a tool called ‘Paintbrush’ in Windows. (In the later versions of Windows, it is called Microsoft Paint).  I started slowly writing the Sanskrit shloka in paintbrush using mouse.  It was not at all easy.  It was also taking lot of time.  I wrote with mouse, (or should I say I drew?), erased, deleted, drew again.  This went on for almost an hour and at the end, I had the Sanskrit Shloka on my presentation!

Next day when Prof. Trivedi started the presentation, I was waiting to see the reaction of the participants when the last slide appeared on the screen.  Finally, when it appeared, the participants were more amused by the slide itself than the meaning of the shloka that Prof. Trivedi was trying to explain!

In professional paintings, one can see the medium mentioned as ‘oil on canvas’, ‘charcoal on paper’ etc.  Similarly, this was my creation – ‘Mouse on Paintbrush’!