During my late teens, I joined a typewriting institute just for the sheer pleasure of learning the art. The institute was at a busy conjunction in the Madras of the mid-nineteen fifties. Overlooking the traffic circle, it was in the upper floor of a big building within about a kilometre from our house.
Our instructor was a middle-aged man of ectomorph habitus and medium stature with a quiff on his pate and a dense salt- and-pepper stubble. I launched into learning the first lesson that involved typing few alphabets and ticked along for an hour everyday. The number of letters I had to type swelled by the day. It turned out to be a kittle-cattle task for me and hence I began the hunt-and-peck method of typing, of course unnoticed by our instructor. As the progress of the lesson became harder, I started typing the characters only with my forefingers. This resulted in a snaggle of the type bars; the instructor had to disentangle them.
I continued with my harebrained manner of typing. But one day, our master, standing behind me like a fly on the wall caught me red-handed and asked me to quit then and there, without accepting even my monthly fee.
Decades rolled by. During my innings as a lecturer in a private technical college following my retirement from the Air Force, I realised that I should have learnt typewriting since I had been sending only handwritten letters, articles and all that jazz for certain widely-read English dailies. Once, one of the newspapers suggested I send typed copies rather than handwritten ones. Typewriting institutes being obsolete, I approached some of the websites with my handwritten copies for their operators to type and send them via the Internet. Some operators, well aware that I was in the dark about computers, charged exorbitant fees.
Later on weekends, my son, a senior deputy manager in a leading MNC, taught me how to use a keyboard. Hungry for learning the art of typing, I spent two hours daily on the device late in the night after returning from college. Within a fortnight I got the hang of it and began sending my writings via Internet. As my passion for computer grew with time I bought a laptop and started using it independently.
I however rue the days when I was dabbling in the precious art of typewriting rather than learning it. The same skill in the later years of my life turned out to be something I could not do without.
Email: nanan2105@gmail.com