Today’s post has been triggered by Jonathan Glancey’s piece in the Guardian about the romance of using the typewriter. Having used several typewriters during the first ten years of my journalistic career I am naturally prejudiced against them. If there was any romance to typing, it escaped me.
Anyone who has had to deal with entangled typebars, ribbon with holes and twisted keys, which is pretty much everyone who has used the typewriter, would tell you that it sounds romantic only in retrospect and in the movies. It is anything but while you are actually typing. Changing a worn-out ribbon used to be such a nightmare for many of my colleagues. There would be panic attacks as the letters on a sheet began fading with the stroke of every key, a clear indication that it was time change the ribbon. I used to be the go-to guy for changing ribbons and untangling typebars.
Not that it was a masterpiece or anything even approaching critical acclaim but my first book, a 1991 biography of Sam Pitroda, was written on a Godrej typewriter. All 80,000 words of it. This is apart from hammering out hundreds of thousands of words before that since 1981. At my peak, I used to clock nearly sixty words per minute (WPM), which was considered in the range of a professional typist. When you consider that I use only the two index fingers to type, your respect for my talent would soar. In my early days, I used to console myself saying that if I could not cut it as a journalist, I could at least make it as a typist. Some of my charitable critics insist that I did indeed make it as a professional typist. In short, I have a fair idea about the joys or otherwise (mostly otherwise) of typewriters.
The best I can say about the typewriter is that whatever one wrote had a certain tactile rawness to it which is missing now. Jonathan refers to Godrej closing down possibly last typewriter making factory in the world. I graduated from a Remington to an Olivetti to a Godrej in a span of ten years. Like all Godrej products its typewriters too was chunky and bereft of any aesthetic qualities. And again like all Godrej products it was a workhorse that worked very well. I remember the transition from the typewriter to the computer was particularly tough for those journalists who had become so used to practically poking and stabbing the hard typewriter keys. Computer keyboards were feather touch in comparison.
There were reporters who would destroy keyboards in a month because they just could not handle the soft touch typing that PC keyboards required. One colleague in particular was so tuned to the rhythms of the typewriter that his right hand would reflexively try to shift an imaginary carriage return lever and instead hit the monitor. He would then let out a string of expletives, chutiya being his favorite.
Incidentally, I am as averse to touchscreen typing now as that irascible colleague then was to the computer keyboard. I can do it but don’t like it.
There is so much more I can write about joys or lack thereof (mostly lack thereof) the typewriter but this should give you some perspective.
P.S.: The most irritating part of the whole experience was when the ribbon would bunch up inside the spools and would require to be rewound manually.
