Taare zameen par. Review on Quillpad

I kind of knew that my relationship with my first-born would be this intense. Alma, my daughter has always been a lively child, totally confident of herself.

Yet, she seeks approval from her mother (that’s me) and though she hates to admit this (she is a leo, afterall), she gets heartbroken if I do not look proud of her at all times (it’s hard work ; taxing but rewarding).

So it was not surprising that the moment she realized that her getting good grades make my eyes shine with happiness, she decided that she is going to be a straight A student and nothing lesser. It is easier said than done, considering that she was only five years old when she decided that.

Add to this the I Quillpad.in nflexible academic environment of our schools, it was an uphill task. Any urban parent knows that life is no ‘Taare zameen par’ when it comes to your child’s education in this unforgiving environment.

So thus began our quest for good grades in her weekly tests. I have never been the kind of parent who sits with the child and teaches her. Instead, I prefer to simply give her all the space she needs and yet be there to guide her, when she needs guidance. So that means that when little Alma is studying, I am just a shout away, just a phone call away, or just in the next room.

This kind of approach required an arrangement which I decided would work best for both of us – and that was in form of worksheets. I would create crisp, professional looking worksheets for her on my computer, print them and give them to her to solve. Then I would do the disappearing act while she would be concentrating. I would only make an appearance when she would be through with them, to correct them and help her to realize her mistakes.

All this worked very well for English, Maths and Science. However, we were flummoxed when it came to Hindi – because I had no way of figuring out how to type in Hindi. Result : I would have to write down long worksheets in Hindi, and my handwriting being as crazy as it is, Alma would look puzzled after every second or third word.

Till the day I discovered quillpad ; A free online Hindi typing tool. Now all I need to do is open quillpad.com, start typing in English whatever needs to be in Hindi, and voila ! As if by magic, its typed in Hindi text. Then copy-paste in Microsoft word, after which you could play around with the size of fonts, the bold or italic or whatever your heart wants.

It only gets better – not only hindi, but with quillpad, you can even type in other languages, like Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi !! After typing out each word, it gives you several close options for the word since it has an inbuilt predictor, so that you could get the word of your desire.

So there is no problem if you have a word that sounds like many other words – the errors are minimised. Not only Alma’s worksheets, but I was also able to type several documents in hindi for my mother. I am sure that this utility would be very useful for people who want to type in their own languages on the computer. Hindi tests are no longer scary monsters. Thanks to quillpad !