Smarty hands

Working from home is a hellish business. There are some conveniences of course - I can make myself filter coffee whenever I want a thought break, the toilet is five, not 63 steps, from my desk, there is natural and not tube light - but the truth is it's simply impossible to get anything done that is professionally useful. Just about anybody who has worked from home will know this, and the rest of you must have read about it long ago in the lifestyle pages, probably beneath a foreign byline.

Here in India, however, the trouble is not the many distractions of the Internet and the fridge. Woe betide the Indian homeworker-homeowner. The building in which I live is a number of years younger than I am, but my electricals and structurals and plumbing, I dare say, are in better order.

As with the body, so with the building: bad material and bad habits wreak systemic havoc. One geyser after another fails, occasionally in a glorious shower of sparks and boiling water. Stop one leak and another one starts; replace one melted electricity outlet and another scorches the wall. One is constantly on the hunt for an honourable repairman; our building's empanelled experts will visit once only to stay forever.

Doubtless a 'Real Man' would twiddle his spanner and the washing machine would stop walking around. For sure he would know that the fridge's ghastly rattle was caused by a loose panel rather than a terminal sickness in the compressor. One squint into the blinking eye of the geyser and he would see that the culprit was a missing wire, not an addled thermostat.

Naturally I'm not that man. I reach for the telephone and rush to the ATM. But I have been reading about that sort of man, in a book called The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. It's the UK edition of Matthew B Crawford's 2009 American bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Crawford has a fascinating work history, which begins with apprenticeship to an electrician by age 14, includes various kinds of engine repair, a degree in physics from a good university, more time as an electrician, a PhD from a great university, some cubicle drudgery writing article abstracts, some highly paid but miserable months in a Washington DC think tank, and ends most satisfactorily with ownership of his own small suburban motorcycle repair business. His author photo shows a sturdy man in soiled work clothes, with an intelligent, sceptical face, standing in front of a shed and next to a vintage motorbike.

It's a terrific book, clear and sensible, and not really like Robert M Pirsig's 1974 hit Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though its subtitle does echo Pirsig's: "An Inquiry into Values". For one thing, Crawford has a lot more to say about motorcycle maintenance. He shows, as he means to, how much those who perform such manual "trades" use their brain and imagination as well as their hands,

the nature of the knowledge community such workers inhabit.

Crawford's thesis is spelled out in the title of his UK edition, and the cultural moment for that thesis is more than ripe in the West, where it goes with such "movements" as Slow Food and the appreciation for "craftsmanship". It is also a strong reaction to the notion of the "knowledge worker". Crawford derides the replaceable "educated generalists" upon whom the "knowledge economy" depends. Indeed, Crawford's kind of man (it must be a man) sounds more well-rounded and useful to the world.

Indians are not there yet. The illusion of control over even our home environment is as yet absent. But we're pelting down the road that way - one clue is what plumbers and electricians now charge - and it may be that one day fairly soon luxury condos will be sold with servant's room and optional sound-insulated home workshop. Until then, the real work of the Indian householder is budgeting and HR.

rraote@yahoo.com