Mohan Bose, director, Kolkata Institute of Graphology.
Mohan Bose is a renowned graphologist. He has been associated with graphology for the last 35 years, working in Bombay and Pune, before moving and permanently settling in Kolkata.
He conducted extensive research on the subject for more than seven years while being associated with The Institute of Graphology and Personal Success, Pune.
In 2002, he established the Kolkata Institute of Graphology. His institution provides consultancy to corporates, forensic handwriting analysis, and graphology and graphotherapy services.
In conversation with The Statesman, Mr Bose shared insights into the science of graphology and its various applications.
What is graphology?
Graphology is the study of handwriting to analyze a person’s behavioral traits and subconscious patterns. It focuses on how something is written rather than what is written. Every individual has a unique handwriting style which arises from his subconscious and unconscious layers.
How does handwriting change over time and what does it reveal about a person’s behavior?
When a child starts writing, they associate letters with memory, language, and visual recognition. The act of writing involves multiple localized brain sections working together.
Our first school is our home where we learn from our parents before entering formal education. Even before birth, if a mother faces trauma, violence, or severe stress, it can affect a child’s overall health and development. It impacts a child’s motor and cognitive skills, which is reflected in their handwriting.
Handwriting is a fine motor skill activity that develops over time. Inside the brain, the motor cortex controls all our physical movements. In early childhood, a baby first learns gross motor movements, such as grasping objects with the whole hand.
Over the years, fine motor skill develops, enabling more precise control using fingers. When a child starts writing, they associate letters with memory, language, and visual recognition. The act of writing involves multiple localized brain sections working together.
Initially, a child reproduces letters as taught in school, but as they grow, their personal experiences and behavioral tendencies begin influencing their handwriting. This is why an individual’s writing style evolves, making it more personalized and unique.
Graphological evidence, i.e., personality traits visible through handwriting, doesn’t appear before the age of 8 or 9. Before this, a child’s handwriting is more of a pictorial representation.
As a child matures, he/she develops opinions, preferences, likes, and dislikes, which affects his/her motor functions. The motor directly impacts handwriting.
A calm person will have smooth, rhythmic, and spontaneous handwriting, while someone experiencing agitation or distress will have slow, inhibited writing and erratic strokes. It is revealed from handwriting.
Can graphology help in career counseling?
Definitely. Every person is born with certain aptitudes. However, everyone doesn’t get the right environment to nurture them. Graphology can help identify these inherent strengths and weaknesses.
Through handwriting analysis, we can understand a person’s suitability for various career paths by assessing their personality traits, cognitive abilities, and behavioral inclinations. This insight can guide individuals toward professions where they can thrive.
How is mental health related to handwriting?
The mind and body are not separate but are deeply interrelated. The motor cortex, and any mental health condition such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, or obsessive-compulsive tendencies, can influence the way a person writes.
These conditions affect motor function, causing variations like acceleration, retardation, jerky movement, and erratic movement, all of which manifest in specific handwriting patterns.
Anxiety and mania lead to squeezing of the motor, excessive leakage of ink, heightened pressure, and movement. Patterns like letter spacing, pressure, ink flow, and word overcrowding help distinguish different psychological conditions.
As behavior influences motor function, handwriting plays a crucial role in understanding mental health.
How do you answer the myths associated with graphology?
One of the biggest myths about graphology is that it is unscientific and unreliable. Usually, people believe in things after they learn that there is logic and evidence. So after explaining the logic and evidence, we learn and believe anything.
However, those who dismiss graphology and spread rumors and myths about it, unfortunately, have not studied the subject. Some intellectuals claim that what they don’t know doesn’t exist.
However, science has its journey and is not bound by any individual’s limitations. Graphology is grounded in neuroscience and psychology, as handwriting is ultimately brain writing.
What is graphotherapy? How does it help an individual?
Graphotherapy is to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of a person from one’s writing sample and then by changing the writing pattern in those areas, we change the behavioral pattern.
Just as repeated advice can shape a person’s behavior in the same way, altering handwriting patterns can rewire the brain’s neural pathways.
Trauma is the past emotional experiences that a person may carry. It is a map. A series of negative experiences are stored and create a map inside the person.
If the number of frustrations is greater, the map will be stronger. When similar experiences trigger, this map activates and reinforces distress. Now, by changing the writing pattern, we dump that old map into a passive memory and activate a new map that can predominantly push us.
Writing involves neuromuscular activity, engaging millions of neurons and neurotransmitters. So when we change writing style, it creates a new map, and when it is conditioned for months, the brain starts behaving in that new pattern. Each day as we behave in a new way, the new map gets stronger. The therapy continues for three months and eventually, we withdraw.
However, the new map now automatically pushes the body, mind, and behavioral patterns of the person and affects the trauma. On the contrary, as the trauma map remains unused, it eventually loses its strength.
Tell us about Kolkata Institute of Graphology
Kolkata Institute of Graphology was established in 2002. It is a registered private organization.
The course is divided into two levels, one is basic and the other one is advanced. The basic course is three months. It covers the analysis of handwriting samples with 85 percent accuracy and also teaches about human life history, the evolution process, how behavior and thoughts are created, and the function of the brain, focusing on identifying 1,500-2,000 handwriting traits.
The advanced level is four months and emphasizes in-depth personality analysis, aptitude assessment, parent-child relationships, relationships with opposite genders, and forensic handwriting examination.
Other than that, we have a graphotherapy department.
(This interview with Roushan Chatterjee appeared first in The Statesman on March 21, 2025. You may access the printed article here)
Disclaimer: One element of handwriting may be analysed at a time, but always look at the entire handwriting sample before arriving at any conclusion.
