Something has been lingering in my head for a few weeks now, and I need to get it out: white people are way more handy than we are.

Think about it. Indians are a group of people who will call someone in for the most minor of inconveniences. Pipe leaking? Call somebody. Self-assembly furniture, the kind that is literally designed for you to assemble yourself? It comes with an added technician who assembles it. When IKEA opened in Hyderabad, it reportedly hired around 150 people just to put the furniture together for customers. DIY became do-it-for-me within a week of landing here. Got a flat on the road? If there’s any way to get help, call them in. Electronics not working? Send it to the repair shop.

Now compare that to the West, where every house, even the ones in movies and shows, has a toolkit with hammers and screwdrivers and a jar of random nails. Where doing a DIY project doesn’t make you some exotic artist, it makes you a normal person.

I wonder why.

My own very small toolkit era

Personally, I’ve been trying to become more handy, trying my hand at fixing stuff on my own. I’ve had some wins and some losses, but I’m definitely way more capable than I thought I’d be before I went into some of these.

For starters, I fixed my flatmate’s toilet seat. Not glamorous, but fixed.

I also did a basic service of my own cycle. I cleaned the chain, changed the tyre tubes and lubricated it. And trust me, it was in pretty bad shape after all the rides, races and transportation it’s been through in the past month.

Then there was the loss. My kitchen abruptly flooded one day, and, high on my new handy-person confidence, I diagnosed it myself: the fridge was leaking. Obviously. I thought very highly of myself for about as long as it took to realise the water wasn’t stopping. Eventually I had to call a plumber, who found out that one of my main pipes had exploded. The fridge was innocent.

So no, I’m not about to start replumbing my flat. Some things really do need someone who knows what they’re doing. But most of what I’ve tried so far wasn’t hard, which is exactly the point. I just never thought it was mine to do.

So, why?

I’ve been trying to think about why different societies are arranged this way, and I keep landing on two explanations.

The first is the obvious one: labour is cheap. In much of the West, getting a plumber or a mechanic to come home costs a lot. People on Reddit point out that mechanics in the US charge something like $85 an hour. At that price, learning to fix your own dishwasher makes sense. Here, it’s a few hundred rupees and somebody will be at your door in an hour. Why would you learn?

Gautam Raja put it really well in The Wild West in the Attic about fixing up his attic in LA. He explains that Indian education and upbringing don’t prepare us for manual labour, “and nor does it sensitise us to its dignity.” Being privileged in an under-privileged country means there’s always someone to do your work for a few rupees, and you get to spend that morning reading or watching TV instead. Something more “noble”.

That word is doing a lot of work. Which brings me to the second explanation.

Caste. India’s deeply rooted caste system assigned certain jobs to certain people, and only to them. That would mean people outside those caste groups either saw those jobs as specialised work that wasn’t theirs to do, or, more honestly, as beneath them.

And it wasn’t only about status. Caste labelled some kinds of work as polluting: anything to do with dirt, waste, dead animals and toilets. Ambedkar wrote that caste isn’t just a division of labour, it’s a division of labourers. So when I say I fixed my flatmate’s toilet seat, I’m aware that of all the jobs in a house, that’s probably the one carrying the weight.

Other writers have gone further and argue that the dominant castes were historically anti-labour, and that the people who actually knew how to make and fix things were the Dalit communities who were looked down on for it.

But the West wasn’t always handy either

Here’s the part that surprised me. The toolbox in every American garage is fairly recent.

In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen wrote about the “leisure class”, the idea that elites everywhere show off their status by very visibly not doing productive work. Rich people in the West were not out there fixing their own pipes.

What changed was economics. After the World Wars, labour got expensive, more people owned their own homes, and power drills and saws started being sold to regular households.

So maybe white people aren’t naturally handy. Maybe they became handy because they ran out of money to pay.

It’s probably both

I think the honest answer is that it’s a combination of the two, and they feed each other. Caste built the distaste for certain work. Cheap labour, which is itself partly a product of that same inequality, means the distaste never gets tested. In the West, rising costs broke the leisure-class habit. In India, nothing has had to break it yet.

And today it isn’t only upper-caste families. Calling someone for everything has become part of what being middle class looks like here, regardless of where you come from. The attitude might have started with caste, but now it travels as class.

I don’t have a neat conclusion. I just know that when I fixed that toilet seat and got my cycle running smoothly again, I felt weirdly proud. And part of that pride was realising how rarely I’d been allowed, or had allowed myself, to feel it.

Here’s to making DIY cool :)