This paper presents the online handwriting recognition for Indian scripts. The primary concern of the approach is the modeling of human motor functionality while writing characters. This is achieved by looking at the whole pen trajectory where the time evaluation of the pen coordinates plays a crucial role. A low complexity classifier has been designed and the proposed similarity measure appears to be quite robust against wide variations in writing styles. Initially, the approach has been applied for online recognition of handwritten characters in Devnagari and Bangla, the two major Indian scripts. A test on a dataset of considerable size shows promising recognition rates namely, 97.29% for Devnagari and 96.34% for Bangla.