After thirty or forty years of habit, in the beginning you would certainly find it difficult to use your left hand, because the left hand has been ignored and kept ignorant. The left hand is really the most important part of your body because it represents the right side of your brain. Your left hand is connected to your right brain, and your right hand with the left brain, just like a cross. The right is really left, and the left is really right. To ignore the left hand is to ignore the right side of your brain – and the right side of your brain contains all that is valuable, all the diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies…all that is valuable – all the rainbows and the flowers, and the stars.

The right side of the brain contains the intuition, the instincts; in short it contains the feminine. The right hand is a male chauvinist.

You will be surprised to know that when I started writing, being such a nuisance, I started writing with my left hand. Of course everybody was against me; again, of course, except my Nani. She was the only one who said, “If he wants to write with his left hand what is wrong with it?” She went on, “The question is to write. Why are you all so concerned which hand he uses? He can hold the pen in his left hand, and you can hold the pen in your right hand. What is the problem?”

But nobody would allow me to use my left hand, and she could not be everywhere with me. In school, every teacher and every student was against me using my left hand. Right is right, and left is wrong; even now I cannot understand why. Why should the left side of the body be denied and kept imprisoned? And do you know that ten percent of people would love to write with their left hand; in fact they had started writing like that but were stopped.

It is one of the most ancient calamities that has happened to man, that half of his being is not even available to him. A strange kind of man we have created! It is like a bullock cart with only one wheel: the other wheel is there but kept invisible; used, but only in an underground way. It is ugly. I resisted from the very beginning.

I asked the teacher and the headmaster, “Show me the reason why I should write with my right hand.”

They just shrugged their shoulders. I then said, “Your shrugging will not help, you have to answer me. You would not accept me if I shrugged my shoulders; then why should I accept you? I don’t take any notice of it. Please explain properly.”

I was sent to the school board because the teachers would not understand me, or explain to me. In fact they understood me perfectly. What I was saying was plain: “What was wrong in writing with the left hand? And if I write the right answer with my left hand, can that answer be wrong – just because it has been written with the left hand?”

They said, “You are crazy and you will drive everybody else crazy. It is better that you go to see the school board.”

The board was the municipal committee which directed all the schools. In the town there were four primary schools and two high schools, one for girls and one for boys. What a town – where boys and girls are kept so absolutely apart. It was this board that made decisions about almost everything, so naturally I was sent there.