For typewriters, ribbon may have finally run out

New Delhi: The end is coming, though admittedly it may not look that way at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, when dozens of young Indians have arrived for morning classes at Anand Type, Shorthand and Keypunch College, and every battered Remington is clattering away.

Looking around the cramped classrooms, you might think that the typewriter still has a future in India. But in one of the last places in the world where it remains a part of everyday life, twilight is at hand.

Even Sunil Chawla will tell you that, and he’s kept Chawla Typewriter going long after the profits disappeared. “We thought this business would go on forever and ever,” said Chawla, a courtly man whose father founded the family company nearly 60 years ago, but whose own sons chose to avoid the typewriter business. “I’ll keep it alive as long as possible. But after me, I don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s no future in this business.”

For now, only one thing keeps him in the business: “I’m a typewriter man,” he said. “I still have a soft spot for them, and I don’t want to let it go.” Plus, people do continue to send him typewriters to fix, though most of his work these days is selling supplies for copiers and laminating machines.

India still has a few thousand remaining professional typists. There are a handful of typewriter repairmen and stores selling spare parts. There are typing schools that, at least occasionally, are jammed with students. There are long-outdated government regulations that, for now, help the typewriter cling to life.