KEY skills attracting rust

For Ashok Digambar Hardikar,Mohan Bandu Bhise and Dilip Sadashiv Kolhatkar,the nostalgia has a faint bitter edge. After spending the best part of their lives as typewriter mechanics,sought after and respected for their skills,they have seen their profession succumb to technology. An inevitable sense of redundancy comes over them as they go about the city repairing the few remnant typewriters in typewriting institutes.

“Till even 10 years ago,one could work 15-16 hours a day just repairing one machine after the other. All factories,companies and government establishments depended entirely on the typewriter for their official work. Now,most places don’t even have a single one left. Like Pune University,where I had an annual contract for maintenance of 140 typewriters. It has all been computerized now,” says Kolhatkar,who started repairing in 1968.

Though the 61-year-old still continues fixing typewriters,he has diversified into supplying stationery too. “The money we make as typewriter mechanics is nothing like it used to be earlier. So,I have to do something more to make ends meet,” he says,adding that most of his contemporaries have gotten into different fields. Kolhatkar also observes that after his generation,there will be no more typewriter mechanics.

Bhise shares that his rise in the field was quick and steady. Learning by keenly observing a typewriter mechanic in the sugar factory that he had joined as a helper,Bhise landed a job with Godrej in Mumbai in 1968. Some years later,he took a transfer to Pune. As the sale of typewriters boomed,work flowed with force to Bhise. But,the bubble began to grow pores. Bhise managed to stay put in his job till 2009,when the company shut their unit in the city. With a few more years to go before retirement,he learnt to handle compressors and other such machines. Since retirement in 2011,he has been doing repair works for some typing institutes in the city. The money is mean and so he has set up a kiosk,selling biscuits,cigarettes and so on. “When I retired,I was drawing a salary of Rs 14,000. Now,I have to do many things to bring the same kind of money home so we can meet our needs. Computers changed things for us drastically. I think,I will start a cyber café too,” he says.

Remembering his heydays,Bhise says the job involved long hours of standing,handling petrol and kerosene and doing minute works. “But fixing a machine that someone else had made,gave me joy. So I kept doing it,” he says. The challenge now is also in getting spare parts.

Hardikar says he trained to be a mechanic in early 70s,to handle repairs at the ancestral typewriting institute. A key person in the smooth functioning of the institute,he did not foresee computers taking over the market completely. Now,with age catching up too,the 68-year-old has let modernisation have its way. He does console himself with one thing – that he was among the last holding fort in a field that is fast losing ground.