New Delhi, November 2025: The CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence has released its latest short documentary, ‘The Disappearing Hand,’ a poetic meditation on the erosion of manual crafts and the vanishing intimacy between the human hand and the world it shapes.
As a platform dedicated to advancing conversations around design, heritage, and sustainability, the Foundation has consistently sought to highlight how human creativity defines our built and cultural environments. Directed by R. Gaur, The Disappearing Hand reflects this vision by turning its lens toward the fragile realm of craftsmanship, where knowledge is not written but felt, passed down through repetition, rhythm, and touch.
In a time when digitization and automation increasingly replace human effort, the film turns to two crafts that once embodied precision, individuality, and the quiet dignity of skill.
One story follows Mr. Rajesh Palta, among the last custodians of the typewriter trade. In his world, each typewriter bore a distinct personality, its sound, resistance, and rhythm becoming an extension of the person who used it. These machines, once belonging to specific writers, lawyers, or typists, carried the marks of their hands and the tempo of their thoughts. To repair them was to understand not just their mechanics, but the relationship between tool and creator.
The other narrative journeys into the workshop of Mr. Ajay Sharma of Rikhi Ram Musical Manufacturing Company, a third-generation luthier whose family has crafted instruments for icons such as Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Vilayat Khan, and The Beatles. For him, the making of a sitar or tanpura is an act of communion, each instrument calibrated for a particular musician, shaped to their sound, their posture, even their silences. In his hands, craft becomes an intimate dialogue between wood, wire, and spirit.
Speaking on the short documentary, Ms. Arunima Kukreja, Founding Director of the CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence, shared: “We believe design is not only what we build, but how we make, how we think through our hands. These crafts hold within them centuries of human intuition and artistry. In celebrating them, we also reflect on the fragility of our own creative traditions in an increasingly automated world.”
Speaking in the film, Mr. Rajesh Palta, Owner of Universal Typewriter Co., shared: “We primarily sold desktop office typewriters to corporate and government institutions. For example, we received orders for 50 machines from BHEL and 40 machines from Engineers India Limited. Our role wasn’t just sales – we also handled servicing and repairs. In fact, we regularly repaired typewriters used in the Prime Minister’s Office, along with many other commercial typewriters across Delhi. At that time, very few individuals purchased portable personal typewriters. In India, the act of typing has traditionally been viewed as a clerical task. But interestingly, even back in the early 1970s, I would say that in America, typing was considered a basic personal skill – even the President of the United States typed his own letters.”
Speaking in the film, Mr. Ajay Sharma, Owner of Rikhi Ram Musical Manufacturing Co., shared: “In 1966, we experienced a truly unforgettable moment. The Beatles – yes, the legendary Beatles – visited our store. They spent nearly 30-45 minutes browsing, but as word spread, a huge crowd gathered outside. It became overwhelming, and for security reasons, they requested that my father bring the instruments to their hotel instead. At the time, it was called The Intercontinental, now known as The Oberoi. My father hired a van, packed all the instruments, and spent the entire day with them at the hotel. He demonstrated and explained various Indian classical instruments – sitar, tanpura, sarod, tabla, santoor, and many others. The band was especially fascinated by the sitar, tanpura, sarod, and tabla, and those were the instruments they eventually chose to take with them.”
Through careful observation, first-hand testimony, and lyrical imagery, The Disappearing Hand reflects on what is lost when touch is replaced by code, yet it also suggests what might endure: a reverence for time, material, and the patient pursuit of beauty.
This documentary is an initiative of the CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence, a platform dedicated to advancing dialogue on design, heritage, and sustainability. Through films, exhibitions, research, and public programmes, the Foundation seeks to engage with the evolving relationship between tradition and modernity in India’s creative and built environment.
The Disappearing Hand, a short documentary produced by the CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence, seeks to document and reflect upon this quiet erasure of those epistemologies. From typewriter tradesmen to Hindustani Classical luthiers, the film explores not only the work of the hand, but the deeper meanings they carry: ways of knowing rooted in gesture, time, and transmission rather than algorithm or automation. Through careful observation and first hand testimony, the film seeks to examine what is lost, what remains, and what might yet endure.
