The QWERTY coup-de-tat

Bengalis have a delightful traditional ceremony for a child of 6 months called ‘Annoprashon’, a part of which entails a ceremony in which the child is given a choice of three things on a plate to pick and choose – a currency note, a small pile of sand and a pen. The idea is; if the child picks the currency, he/she has a future in business, if the sand, future as a hermit, if the pen, future as a writer.

I was reminded of the last part (I picked the pen, if you must know) when a couple of days back, I sat down to write an application for my college. When I had the pen in my hand and the paper in front of me, it suddenly struck me – this was perhaps the first time in the last one and half year that I was actually using a pen to write something more extended than my signature.

After the realization with the application, I suddenly began to see how much the keyboard has invaded the textual world. Starting from the shortest message (SMSes) to the longest thesis, the QWERTY has silently inflicted a coup-de-tat on the ABCDEF. I mean look around you, name one major process that is now done by hand writing.

Starting from the most fundamental human communication of sending letters to filling up forms of banks and schools to paying your bills, everything is moving on to the ‘virtual’ world making the clippity clap of the keyboard the middleman. Even in the most old world government office, notorious for their resistance to change, you would find people setting their glasses on the bridge of their noses and peering into a monitor.

It seems strange how something so fundamental as writing is almost certainly being driven to extinction that if it were an animal, writing would most certainly be on the top of some endangered list. And what is most interesting is how easily this change has come over us and how quickly we have adapted to it and how much we have embraced this new world while letting the old one flow away.

When I was in my third year of engineering, which would be just three years back, I was still submitting handwritten assignments and my speed of SMSing was painfully slow. Now three years later, the mere thought of writing a long application tires my fingers and it gets more depressing when I see the handwriting in front of my eyes. It’s an honest fact that my handwriting is regressing – the symmetry is unraveling at the edges and some letters tilt a bit awkwardly with continuous writing. And know what the most discomforting part of old school writing is? The lack of an automatic spell check and formatting manager!!!

And that’s me – a person who has completed almost the whole of his education using pen and paper. I cannot live without Microsoft word now. I think of people starting their schools now. How long will it take for somebody to wake up and declare that learning to write is useless since they would be tapping on a keyboard for the rest of their lives anyway. High school assignments are already being submitted via email and by taking printouts. How long will it take for it to percolate down to the nursery? Looking at the speed of technology acceptance, I won’t give writing more than 5 years of existence in the most urban schools. And stretching my imagination a bit further, maybe in the not so distant future, our alphabets would start with Q, W, E…I mean what gives A the right to be the king anyway?

Now is this usurping a good thing or is it not? Now I believe that every revolution has its lighter and darker side. The French revolution changed how people looked at themselves but the revolution also had its guillotines. And a revolution it is, this QWERTY one. It has made accessibility easier, made publishing easier, made organizing better, made democracy more feasible in many instances, made communication easier, made us wealthier. This revolution has also made our patience shorter, has made us lose our personal touches, has made us poorer in our human feelings, increased our loneliness in many ways, increased our workload, lessened the time we can spend with our family.

There is a line in Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” when the priest says simply “This will conquer that” first pointing at a parchment and then at the facade of the Notre Dame cathedral. Mass writing and reading was at this time becoming a reality in medieval Europe thanks to Gutenberg. What the priest meant was that this mass literacy was going to destroy the art of architecture, which till then was a form of expression for the people. From now on, popular writers will take that place.

I think we are at a similar juncture. The plastic keyboard will replace the handwritten word. Who is to say it’s bad. We love old world architecture for what it is. In the future, we would love beautiful handwritten words for their beauty. So it goes, I guess.

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