For more than twenty years, Imran Haq has made his living inside the human face. As an ophthalmic and oculoplastic surgeon he works in millimetres, often in fractions of one, around the eye, the most delicate territory in the body. It is work that demands a kind of focus most people never have to find: complete, unbroken, the rest of the world switched off. He can hold his hands perfectly still inside a human eye. What he could not do, one evening at his own desk, was hold his attention long enough to write a single paragraph of a book he had been meaning to write for years. So he set out to build something that would let him. He called it Tagore.
A yellow typewriter
To understand the machine, it helps to start with a different one. Haq's father, a college professor now retired, kept a yellow Olivetti Lettera on his desk throughout his son's childhood, and Haq still names the sound of it, the clatter of the keys and the sharp return of the carriage, as one of the first sounds of his life. It was a machine that did exactly one thing. You sat down, and you wrote. Nothing waited behind the page to pull you somewhere else.
“My father believed that paying real attention to something was a form of respect,” Haq says. “A student, a sentence, another person. He gave me the idea long before I knew it was one.”
What focus is worth
Focus was never abstract for him. Haq arrived at Oxford University in 2003 - the oldest university in the world, and one of the most exclusive, hosting 31 UK Prime Ministers, at least 30 international leaders (including presidents), and numerous global royals (including at least 9 reigning monarchs) - as one of only three students of Bangladeshi origin admitted to the university that year.1 Being that much of an outsider, he says, teaches you how to work when part of you suspects you do not belong, and how much of any achievement is simply the ability to concentrate while everything around you suggests you should not be there.
The career that followed took him somewhere harder. He has worked in some of the poorest parts of Britain and in places far poorer still, repaired the faces of men stabbed in prison and in gang violence, treated people wounded in conflict, and cared for children harmed by the adults meant to protect them. He will not trade on any of it. But work of that weight, he says, changes the size of things, and it makes the quieter thefts harder to ignore.
Because when he finally sat down to write a book about that work, he found that he could not. He would write a sentence and reach for his phone without deciding to, then surface twenty minutes later with nothing on the page. “I have trained for decades to concentrate while a great deal is at stake,” he says. “And still, at my own desk, I lost. That was when I understood the problem was not me.”
An unfair fight
It is not a fair fight, and was never meant to be. Some of the most capable minds of the age, neuroscientists and behavioural designers, are paid handsomely to make it as hard as possible to put a phone down, aimed squarely at the oldest reward circuits in the brain. 2 The average person now holds their attention on a single screen for about forty-seven seconds before moving on.3
“We didn’t become weak,” Haq says. “We were outspent.”
His answer was not another app promising to fix the problem from inside the device that causes it, but a separate, quiet object that cannot be hijacked, because there is nothing in it to hijack. One that does a single thing, the way his father's typewriter did. You sit down, and you write.
Why Tagore
The name came easily. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote by hand for decades and treated putting true words on a page as something close to sacred: a fitting name for a machine built for focus, chosen by the son of a Bengali professor with a typewriter on his desk. (His story is here.)
One purpose
Tagore the device has no apps, no feeds, no notifications, and no way to fall down a hole: a real keyboard, a calm screen, one purpose. Haq is the first to say it will not save the world. But it might hand a writer back the hours quietly being taken from them, and let them finally make the thing they have always meant to make.
He is still writing his book. He writes it on Tagore.
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Tagore is a distraction-free writing device built for deep, undistracted work. Reservations are open now, with a $10 fully refundable deposit.
Reserve Tagore at writetagore.com →Common questions
Who is the founder of Tagore?
Tagore was founded by Dr Imran Haq, a London-based consultant ophthalmic, oculoplastic and reconstructive surgeon who trained at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.
Why was Tagore created?
Imran Haq created Tagore after finding he could not focus to write a book, despite a career built on surgical concentration. He set out to give people a single-purpose writing device to reclaim their attention from technology engineered to be addictive, inspired in part by his father's yellow Olivetti Lettera typewriter.
What is Tagore the device?
Tagore is a distraction-free writing device: a single-purpose machine with a mechanical keyboard and a calm screen, and no apps, feeds or notifications. It is named after the poet Rabindranath Tagore and is open for reservation ahead of its launch.
Sources
- On the very small numbers of British Bangladeshi students admitted to Oxford in this period, see The Guardian, 22 December 2003.
- On the deliberate design of technology to capture attention, see the Center for Humane Technology, founded by former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris: humanetech.com.
- Gloria Mark, Attention Span (2023); the finding that average focus on a single screen has fallen to around 47 seconds. American Psychological Association, “Why our attention spans are shrinking”.