A solemn Tony Fernandez would shimmer into the Statesman office in Mumbai every six months, slide behind 50-year-old Royal and Halda typewriters, brush metal alphabets on keys, oil the insides, change bi-colored ribbons in a once familiar now nearly dead ritual of man and machine.
Typewriters and mechanics like Fernandez went from being endangered to near-extinct species last week, with Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai making global news when the company put in sale its last 200 typewriters. The passing of the world's last typewriter maker, seemed like a full stop on the whole typewriter era, and was mourned by media across continents from New Yorkto London, Dublin to Delhi.
This was the final curtain, it seemed, for a gadget, invented by
Pennsylvania-born publisher-politician Christopher Latham Sholes, that upgraded civilization by allowing readable words to be produced easier and faster than ever before. On June 23, 1868, the US Patent Office issued patent number 79,265 for the first easily usable typewriter since English inventor Henry Mills' patent for a "writing machine" in 1714.
But the obituaries may be, as Mark Twain suggested after reading of his own death, slightly exaggerated.
Godrej & Boyce, the world's last major typewriter maker, stopped making typewriters in 2009. Collectors worldwide are currently calling for its final stock of 200, even though most of the machines carry Arabic script. Stray, smaller typewriter makers exist, in Chicago, another in New Jersey, China, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Typewriter users too are not yet extinct like the dodo, whistle lollipops, Hydrox cookies and Boeing-collar shirts. Typewriter mechanic Fernandez appears less often, but typewriters continue to be used in India, in government offices, law courts, even in some of the newspapers offices in Mumbai that Fernandez served. The end may not yet be nigh for this writing machine once hailed as an engineering marvel.
The historic Fort area in Mumbai could be the world's final typewriter Shangri-La, hosting the last of the typewritans-tribe surviving in the urban jungle and depending on typewriters for a living.
"Over 50 manual typing shops are still functioning in Fort," said red-haired H N Savla, whose Star Typing agency began operations42 years ago at Raja Bahadur Mansion in Homi Modi Street. "Nowhere else can you find so many manual typewriter shops still surviving in one area."
Savla and fellow Fort typewritans serve as reminders of the truth of impermanence - that nothing lasts forever, and what is indispensable today could become an obsolete oddity tomorrow. Circa 2050, school children could see photographs of a 3.1GHz iMac or a HP TouchSmart 610q computer and ask parents bemusedly: "What are these?"
Among surviving iconic typewriters, the Remington is Savla's favorite. North Carolina-based American gun maker Remington apparently decided the word was mightier than the bullet and became the world's first typewriter manufacturer in 1873. Savla has eight Remingtons at home as standby. "Typewriter ribbons are still easily available," he says, "but I have to do the repairs myself".
Like other job typists in Fort, a bustling maze of cobble-stoned small lanes, Savla and his colleagues Kulkarni and Rawankar use their battered typewriters for filling government forms, wills, court documents, agreements, deeds and even ordinary letters. "A computer can't be used to fill in a printed government form or court documents," Savla says. "Entries have to be typed."
The typewriter sanctuary in Mumbai's 18th century Fort area is the core commercial district of India's financial capital, an architectural treasure of Gothic, Venetian, and other heritage buildings so striking that former US president Bill Clinton stopped his presidential convoy during his official visit in March 2000 to gawk at the colonial era skyline between Flora Fountain and the Victoria Terminus railway station.
"The Stock Exchange and High Court being nearby helps us get regular customers," said Savla. "Some lawyers don't have their own office and find it cheaper to have documents typed rather than obtain a computer print-out."
The last major typing tutorial institute also functions in this area, a survivor from three decades ago when dozens of neighborhood typing schools dotted India's main cities. The 110-year old Davar's Institute in Fort continues to offer a four-month manual typewriting course with a government-recognized finishing certificate.
"We still get five to 10 enquires daily for the manual typewriting classes," said Marino Couto, a manager at Davar's Institute, which also offers secretarial, foreign language and computer courses. "Most are students wanting to learn using typewriters in order to increase their computer typing speed."
Friday morning peak-hour traffic rushed to various destinies under a blazing May sun outside Davar's third-floor premises in the ancient Mulla House, near Flora Fountain. Inside the small typing classroom with wooden desks, Dhanraj Shah was the solitary occupant clattering away on a Godrej Facit typewriter. Three unmanned machines waited nearby. "I am employed as a clerk and I enrolled to increase my computer typing speed," Shah said. "It's easier to increase typing speed learning on a manual typewriter." He recalls seeing many offices still with old manual typewriters, but lying unused.
One typewriter in the Statesman newspaper branch office in Mumbai continues serving the advertising section to file copies of release orders. An off-duty classic Royal typewriter, now probably a valuable antique, sits on a glass-topped corner table at the officeof general manager Ralph Pais, alongside a 1970s black telephone with the whirring rotary dial and an early 1990s mobilephone the size of a shoe brush and weight of a boot. A vintage Halda typewriter has been retired to the warehouse.
Typewriters being banished as a species seemed unthinkable decades ago. In 1955, India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, congratulated Adi Godrej for placing India among technically advanced nations by manufacturing India's first indigenous typewriter in 1954, and becoming Asia's first typewriter maker.
The Godrej typewriter had 2,500 parts, yet never suffers from crashed drives, virus and hacker attacks, bothersome browsers shutting down on their own, and perennial peddling for upgrades.
The typewriter was an essential journalistic tool two decades ago, when newsrooms thundered with dozens of the machines being pounded under clouds of tobacco smoke, amid tele-printersnoisily spitting news agency feeds. A working day without a typewriter in 1990 was as unthinkable as a day in 2011 without an Internet connection.
"The manual type writer will continue being used here," said Savla from his Mumbai typewriter haven in Fort. "It won't fully die out."
He could be right, as the timeless sub-continent does not forget old friends - India launches space vehicles such as the Chandrayaan-1 to the Moon, but the humble bullock cart can still be sometimes seen trundling leisurely across a Mumbai street, like a connecting link across epochs.
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