Twenty-five-year old S Haripriya of Alanthurai near Coimbatore has been hogging the limelight for the rare talent she has been endowed with. A post-graduate in fashion designing, Haripriya wrote all the 1,330 couplets of Thirukkural in the mirror writing method (reverse writing) and that too in record time of 24 hours, 35 minutes and 35 seconds, which fetched her two Jetlee Book of Records and two national records.

Haripriya wrote the Thirukkural couplets in reverse on a portrait of Thiruvalluvar measuring 3 feet by 2 feet in miniature font.

“I had to write each couplet in a minuscule 2 cm space. It was a marathon exercise which demanded immense eye-hand coordination on my part. The Thirukkural couplets written in miniature form can be read only by placing a mirror in front of it. And one might need a lens to read it,” said Haripriya, who sweated a lot over her passionate project.

“I took up the moral Bible of the Tamils, which is the Thirukkural, for my mirror writing as the compendium has given humanity a lot of practical wisdom. Thirukkural is read by every Tamil and the young generation should also read and benefit from the Tamil classic which is over 2000 years old. I had to practice a lot before I took up this challenge,” Haripriya, who is left-handed, said.

Haripriya was felicitated recently by Tarun Vijay, MP, who is a champion of Thirukkural and who played an instrumental role in installing the statue of the saint on the banks of the Ganga in Rishikesh.

Kundrakudi Adigalar and Coimbatore District Collector T N Hariharan have also felicitated the young woman who took this monumental effort to popularise the ‘Ulaga pothu marai’ in reverse writing.

According to researchers the ability to do mirror writing is an inherited trait. Only 10 in 65,000 people are found to be real mirror writers and half of them inherit the trait. A higher proportion among them are left-handed as it is more natural for them to write backwards.