Living in the past: In Attock, wooden abacus in a time of calculators

A vegetable vendor sticks to a centuries-old counting frame for daily calculations.

ATTOCK: Some people brave the raging tides of change with remarkable tenacity. A vegetable vendor in Attock is one such unconquerable spirit, who chooses to stick to a centuries-old wooden abacus for day-to-day calculations at his shop.

“Panji Baba”, as he is known in the locality, who seemed reluctant to disclose his real name, says that he inherited the antique abacus from his father Shah Gul and has been using it for the last 60 years.

Standing upright in the face of fast-paced progressiveness which constantly threatens to pilfer away the romance of the years gone by, Panji Baba thinks ‘old is gold’, and refuses to part with his abacus. He says that he can perform calculations of up to one billion on it without any difficulty.

Baba says that his father, who was also a shopkeeper, had used the abacus for almost 70 years. However, he laments that his beloved calculating device will be discarded by his technology-obsessed progeny after his death. “This abacus will become useless as
my sons and grandsons are more interested in the use of modern calculators,” says Baba.

The vegetable vendor is a diehard fan of the abacus and critical of new technology. He counts several advantages of using an abacus, saying that it needs no charging, no cells, is durable and neither is there any risk of its theft.

Edited by Faiza Rahman

Published in The Express Tribune, October 16^th, 2012.