THE STENOGRAPHER

 THE STENOGRAPHER

Another category of youth, looking for jobs in government offices –either provincial or national were stenographers. The present generation might not have had an opportunity to meet or understand who a ‘stenographer’ was. Stenography was a ‘sure to succeed’ skill, since there was a steady requirement for skilled scribes who were meticulous recipients of any message and scribe them without missing a syllable. Such was their ‘ear-hand co-ordination’ that they were the most sought after b[r]and of reliable communicators. Their indispensability in offices of the administration or in Press or voice media [Radio]  was due to the ‘all-too-important’ fidelity in precise transmission of message –as received from an official or a diplomat or politician or any guest.

Incidentally what was behind their skill for adept message transmission? How did they manage uniformity in content though brought out by different news agencies.     

Stenographers were persons well trained to quickly record words in a symbol-like code and literally compressing many things into a brief passage. This scribing was named ‘writing in short hand’. Most such stenos were well trained in type-writing as well. Most of them would transmit the message to the appropriate authority for further action.

For instance, a news scribe would get to some tele-printing facility and type out the information for publication. A politically sensitive utterance made in an obscure corner of a town hits the headlines –as transmitted by the correspondent. In keeping with the philosophy of the Newspaper, a political speech by a leader finds a distorted version causing a huge ripple damaging the political fortune of the party whose spokes- person is identified as the author of the statement. Either by intent or by interest, these days ‘distortions’ are projected. Some 40 years ago, misreporting was a stray event.   My personal feeling is-- reporters of the earlier era adopted a near fool-proof strategy of shorthand scribing to completely incorporate all information; later they used to bring out the crux in clarity to the recipient.

Now-a-days reporters are struggling to frame an appropriate question that can elicit the truth.  

News men of the earlier era had the knack of intimately grasping every utterance, as they could right away ‘scribe’ every phonetic feature; it meant their having gathered the total message; So, they could readily confront any political utterance – based on the very statements made on the occasion.

Further the training that they had had in stenography was sound enough to augment most words and their significance.

There are several tools of training like ‘Pitman’s, Tee line’s, Boyd’s to name a few as ‘models’ for training.  

The then matriculates used to get trained in Shorthand and type writing as contiguous exercises for job seeking.

In India, most South Indian youth used to get placed in government jobs in Northern India, as their grasp of English language / short hand skills were adequate.

I do not know if the present day youth avail of such training as a route to livelihood. It was a boon to those who nothing to fall back upon except by steady income.  

 

Like “steth” being a pet reference to stethoscope, steno was to stenographers.