Dehradun, March 8 -- Ambika Singh

We belong to a generation that somehow muddled through two centuries and passed the two-millennium milestone. In the 1970s, I began fooling around with a manual typewriter. The toughest part, if not nigh impossible, was getting a proper word count, counting the words per line and multiplying by the number of lines per page to get an approximate idea. Fixing errors was a whole other thing: you used strips of finger-length typex correction tape, which meant switching the ribbon to neutral, retyping the error to remove it, and switching back to the use-ribbon mode. Then you retyped the correction.

Below our home used to be the Remington Typewriter Repair Company, a small shop-cum-residence owned by the Kan...