JOURNAL

Words and image by Rohini Pandey
Dec 23, 2022

Earlier this year I was given a typewriter as a precious gift, a freshly restored 1962 Hermes Baby in a delicious, vintage mint-green hue and in mint working condition. It came enclosed in a canvas mint bag printed with more vintage-y, grandmotherly florals on the inside. I was delighted.

This “inferior technology” device led to a few conversations with friends. The obvious question was - isn’t owning a typewriter in 2022 pretentious?

And honestly, maybe it is. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Because you can only realistically pretend to pace your life and actions today. Slow, deliberate movements full of errors and no backspace are not “organic” or “authentic” to us as we exist today. They need us to put on a kind of act, at least at first, and posture and perform awkwardly at a mode of life we have watched, read about and fantasized about but not necessarily lived, at least in recent memory. Hanging out with out-of-time clunky objects is weird and completely out of step with the ‘natural’ rhythm of our modern attention spans and instincts - the one that lets you shoot a text before you’ve even had time to think about it or watch videos at the speed of young adult vampires going after their prey.

Typing on a typewriter is a forced regression, like giving yourself amnesia and going back to a state of QWERTY noobness. Then, a large part of the machinery is on display, a distraction of carriages, levers, wheels and spools, compelling you to wait and watch and listen to metal bits click and keep up with your mindless and typically silly actions (afterall there’s no mistaken CC here). When you fix the margin lock, you are taken back to that 3rd grade class on margins and how uncivilized life is without them. When you shove and slide the return lever for a measly new line, you are forced to consider the one you just typed. And when you make your hundredth typo, all you can do is cringe, take a deep breath and carry on.

Soon you have a document full of shit spellings but some of the most important sentences you feel you’ve ever written. Even if the sentence is hexxl o hw ias lif?

Earlier this year I was given a typewriter as a precious gift, a freshly restored 1962 Hermes Baby in a delicious, vintage mint-green hue and in mint working condition. It came enclosed in a canvas mint bag printed with more vintage-y, grandmotherly florals on the inside. I was delighted.

This “inferior technology” device led to a few conversations with friends. The obvious question was - isn’t owning a typewriter in 2022 pretentious?

And honestly, maybe it is. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Because you can only realistically pretend to pace your life and actions today. Slow, deliberate movements full of errors and no backspace are not “organic” or “authentic” to us as we exist today. They need us to put on a kind of act, at least at first, and posture and perform awkwardly at a mode of life we have watched, read about and fantasized about but not necessarily lived, at least in recent memory. Hanging out with out-of-time clunky objects is weird and completely out of step with the ‘natural’ rhythm of our modern attention spans and instincts - the one that lets you shoot a text before you’ve even had time to think about it or watch videos at the speed of young adult vampires going after their prey.

Typing on a typewriter is a forced regression, like giving yourself amnesia and going back to a state of QWERTY noobness. Then, a large part of the machinery is on display, a distraction of carriages, levers, wheels and spools, compelling you to wait and watch and listen to metal bits click and keep up with your mindless and typically silly actions (afterall there’s no mistaken CC here). When you fix the margin lock, you are taken back to that 3rd grade class on margins and how uncivilized life is without them. When you shove and slide the return lever for a measly new line, you are forced to consider the one you just typed. And when you make your hundredth typo, all you can do is cringe, take a deep breath and carry on.

Soon you have a document full of shit spellings but some of the most important sentences you feel you’ve ever written. Even if the sentence is hexxl o hw ias lif?

They are important because you’d have felt connected to every hit, stroke and ink blotch of your actions. Small tangible touches that touch back. They are important because they don’t let you forget why you did something or that underneath emails, tweets and ebooks there are first words and letters, those tiny shapes and things that the child in you fell in love with ie if you are anything like me.

For you, it could be just be music and Vinyl, letting you listen in a way that doesn’t have to be anything else, no playlists jostling for screentime with 50 tabs, DMs and a half-watched movie, just you and an artist you love so much - you bought the LP. Or you who is rediscovering the joy of taking and developing photos with a 35mm film camera. Or you who is busy building a jungalow inside a Mumbai apartment. Or you who is taking piano classes at 30. Or you who makes it a point to send hand-written notes to friends and clients. Or you who is soldiering through an entire ancestry’s recipes in the kitchen. Or you who is ordering wood-working tools as we speak.         

A Forbes article once said that the more time we spend immersed in technology, the more likely we are to seek a reprieve with the tangible, the real, the analog. Maybe because the reprieve of analog gadgets and hobbies is for an entire evolutionary timeline of human minds and bodies and the untenable load of stimulus they find themselves buried in. 

The digital revolution was a blitzkrieg. It was fast, transformational and changed big realities in the blink of an eye. 

The analog revolution will be unhurried, a laggard. The analog revolution will be an absurd shame on the race. It will be an awkward retracing of steps to find that spot in the shade we didn’t stand long enough in and couldn’t find again. 

The analog revolution won’t change the world at all. 

And therein will probably lie its value.

It will be an awkward retracing of steps to find that spot in the shade we didn’t stand long enough in and couldn’t find again. 

The analog revolution won’t change the world at all. 

And therein will probably lie its value.

Rohini is a Strategy Director at TOD. She loves to read, write, look for trees and question the world around her. When not studying consumer culture, she can be found exploring history, design, architecture and romcoms!

A note about the Journal

For us at Thought Over Design ‘Creativity’ isn’t an end product. It’s an ongoing journey of inspiration that comes from fresh observations of the world, headlong dives into curious obsessions, explorations of art and culture, listening to diverse voices, and a million more places we’re still discovering.

The Journal is an experiment in sharing these musings with the world. It’s a mixed bag of scribbles from our research, inspiration sessions, lateral think pieces, work from designers we admire, pop-culture takes and often our own agenda-free creative pursuits.

The stories and ideas we share here are an attempt to not just gather our own thoughts but also leave the world a little more inspired than we found it.