29 April,2011 09:51 AM IST | | Sheena Thomas
The typewriter might be a thing of the past with Indian companies stopping the manufacturing of the archaic machine, but here's one man who treasures his 43-year-old piece more than anything else in the world.
Chandrakant Bhide, who has been making portraits on his typewriter for four decades now, talks to CS about his favourite past-time and the disappointment of losing his best pal to technology:
Picture perfect
I was working with a bank before I took the voluntary retirement in 1996 to pursue various interests like classical music and making typewriter portraits. My boss had once asked me to type out the intercom list and I typed it in the form of a telephone. I did that using the alphabet x, so it looked like cross-stitch. When I was quitting, I requested my boss to let me buy the company typewriter. Then at my farewell party, he sold it to me for Re 1. Since then I have created over 150 portraits of famous personalities like Sachin Tendulkar, Bal Thackeray, Lata Mangeshkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Brian Lara, RK Laxman cartoons, Mahatma Gandhi and others. I used the @ sign to create Sachin's hair and of course x is great to write text with.
Just my type
Working on these portraits takes a minimum of six hours. You can't delete an error in an typewriter, so you have to be very careful. Or then the paper might get stuck when you're getting the portrait out. I've lost several of my art pieces in this manner. In fact there aren't too many people who would be able to create something out of a typewriter. I get emotional when I think that there won't be any typewriters available anymore.
