Time DIY-challenged Indians learnt to make their own beds

In one of many snarky cartoons epitomising the Swedish furniture company Ikea, which debuted in India this week, a prospective employee is invited to come in and take a seat before an interviewing panel. But the chair is in several knocked-down, disassembled pieces, implying that the interviewee has to assemble it as a first test. Another cartoon shows a young man boasting, “I can handle Ikea furniture without instruction,” causing his female companion to instantly offer to get into the sack, so impressed she is with his new-age machismo.

Such memes are both a tribute to and a take-down of the Swedish giant’s Do-It-Yourself (DIY) concept that largely involves self-service and a certain facility with assembling discrete parts into a logical whole in a precise, sequential manner, a feat that is apparently beyond the scope of most people. In fact, one derisive pie chart shows only a small sliver of time spent putting Ikea furniture (its main offering) together; two large pies go under the head “taking it apart because you did it wrong” and “cursing”. Another greeting card offers the sage advice, “You cannot be ready for marriage until you’ve BOTH survived putting an Ikea furniture kit together.”


All this knocking down and talking up leads one to wonder how Ikea, ubiquitous in 50 countries across the world through 400 outlets, will fare in India, its latest frontier, and as many multinationals have recorded, a unique market. How Ikea will eke out a niche in India will also say as much about India as it will about Ikea, as both cultures discover each other. Already, there are reports that the furniture giant is tweaking some of its principles to suit the Indian ecosystem and market, a cop out that will do little to improve our self-worth.

Consider this: Ikea’s unique selling proposition, its DIY model, is largely wasted in India on two counts: Most Indian middle class is leery of physical work, in part due to an abundance of cheap labour. Why would you pay $99 for delivery and assembly of a chest of drawers or wardrobe worth $299 (a typical rate in the US), when your neighbourhood carpenter would haul it in and bang it together (wrongly?) for a few bucks? Or better still knock off an imitation for half the price? So apparently, Ikea is not going to be testing India’s DIY skills a whole lot to begin with. Later perhaps?

Why Indians are so iffy with anything that involves building or assembling through manual or physical work is a story that goes beyond the availability of cheap labour. Much of socialist India worked its way up through denial, deprivation, or modest means at best. Remember how sacrosanct that one Murphy radio or EC television or Jawa motorbike or Lambretta scooter or Fiat/Ambassador car was back in the ’60s and ’70s? In many homes, touching it, much less opening the back or the engine or the hood was a strict no-no, and invited censure, if not spanking, from the parents.

Besides, Brahminical aspirations did not involve getting one’s hands dirty; that was left to the others — the labour class. The emphasis was on mental callisthenics; not physical labour. As a result, India has produced a vast army of “educated” people who can crack quadratic equations and recite tomes by rote but would be challenged to put four legs on a table, much less change a fried fuse or a busted tyre. Is it any different with the millennials of India in 2018? Not holding my breath.

Still, there will be hopefully some upside to the venture if more people eventually embrace the culture of doing it oneself. For too long, India has been in thrall of its own idea of “jugaad”, seen ideally as an innovative low-cost hack, but also practised widely as a sketchy shortcut solution. Few things in India whether roads or road signs or sidewalks or building codes — involve rules, standards, or precision, and the arrival of the Ikeas and Home Depots will hopefully herald an end to the randomness that is endemic in our everyday life.

After all, for all the caterwauling that accompanied the entry of the KFCs and McDs, back in the 1990s, the one thing they introduced, aside from more starch and grease than we already had, was standards and cleanliness. An open kitchen became the norm even in Indian ‘tiffin’ places serving idli-dosa, and in time the Western chains even mutated their fare to suit Indian palates. What is to say Ikea will not follow suit?

Of course there will always be Cassandras who will say that it will be curtains for Indian carpenters and furniture makers, but we’ve been through this debate before. We survived the food onslaught; we’ll handle the wood too.