Street of Typewriters. Street of Scribes. Mysore
Typewriters! The rhythmic cheerful metallic rat a tat tat audible even above all the street sounds…
mostly the persistent smog whirr and hurtle honk of circling rickshaws
there is something curiously satisfying about redundant technology … these mechanical contraptions of yore …
a collaboration of type set metal, set on sticks… then the reams of blueBlack ink and smudge carbon paper
these typists were down a side street near Mysore palace, towered over by Raj era, slightly pompous indo saracenic (sarcastic?!) buildings, likewise relics of a bygone epoch
Not the best photo, indeed, just a snap in passing… I half remember(?) exactly the same scene from when I first came here back in the 80s
I loved the way the customer, he with the scooter helmet, mobile phone at his side, was animatedly explaining what he wanted, whilst the typist alternated between earnest attention and that faraway stare, almost rapt, as he typed away
composition as collaboration
Fascinated, the next day I returned to chat with Ramesh… balding, gentle natured, a mild beige shirt, seemingly old, but in truth probably 10 years younger than I… He proudly told me he had been working here 25 years, his only ever job.
I blurted out the obvious ‘but but computers!!!’ he explained that 15% of Indian written communication was still done in this way! people preffered it… mostly the job was translating official-esque documents from Kannadian (language of Karnataka, with its beautiful curly wurly alphabet) into English… depositions, legalese pleas… and yet, and yet, I am sure he would sometimes turn his skills to writing the occasional purple prose of a love letter… wringing emotions into ink, codifying the heart… it was ever thus for scribes
I think, in another life, I would have happily been a scribe, mbe at the court of Tipu Sultan, the late 18th century, with a beautiful coloured turban, sniffing a Rose (a frequent motif), gnawing on a florid ink besmirched feather quill, concocting love letters for a customer… like something from Orhan Pamuks ‘My Name is Red’
