http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-india-typewriter-20110901,0,417491,full.story
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"The factories that make the machines may be going silent, but India's typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer. (...)
"Credit for its lingering presence goes to India's infamous bureaucracy, as enamored as ever of outdated forms (often in triplicate) and useless procedures, documents piled 3 feet high and binders secured by pink string.
"Other loyalists include the over-50 generation and, conversely, young people in rural areas who dream of a call-center job but can't yet afford a laptop. There are also certain advantages to a machine without a power cord in a country where 400 million people still lack electricity.
"Power failures help us," said Rajesh Palta of Delhi's Universal Typewriter shop, whose family fled Pakistan for India during the 1947 partition with their most precious possessions: four typewriters.
"Perhaps it's telling that India decided only last year to remove typewriter production as a component of its wholesale price index measuring inflation.
"Although bureaucrats in growing numbers embrace computers, the governments of several states, including those containing New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, still require manual typing tests. And that's music to the ears of typing institutes, second-hand typewriter dealers and repairmen.
"I don't know why the test hasn't changed," said Debolina Mitra, a manual instructor at Kolkata's George Telegraph Typing Institute. "It's bureaucrat logic."
"India's lingering love affair with correction fluid and carbon paper befits a country that often seems caught in two centuries, where high-tech companies and an ambitious space program coexist with human-powered rickshaws and feudal village life. (((Contrast with American unambitious space program and Presidential candidates who deny evolution. Not to mention American ultra-rich moguls, which, come to think of it, is an Indian word.)))
"Indian firm Godrej and Boyce, one of the world's last typewriter makers, released its first commercial model in 1955, reportedly inspired by then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who saw it as a "symbol of independent and industrialized India." Nehru reportedly received one of the first machines.
"Over the next few decades, owning a manual typewriter was a major status symbol. "Small companies with a typewriter were really going somewhere," Palta said.
"Demand during the 1960s and '70s was so high that customers waited up to six months for new machines, which cost nearly as much as a recent engineering graduate's yearly salary of about $175...."
