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Science Craft Essay

Notes on Repair

On the quiet competence of people who fix things.

The man who repairs umbrellas outside the station has been there longer than the station's current roof. He works from a folding stool and a tin box, and he has never, in my hearing, described what he does as a craft.

He is fast in the way that only long practice makes people fast: not hurried, just without any wasted motion. A broken rib takes him ninety seconds. He does not look at the umbrella while he talks to you about it.

There is a category of skill that gets no vocabulary because the people who have it do not need one. Naming a thing is what you do when you are teaching it to someone who does not have it, or defending it from someone who wants it gone. He is doing neither. He is fixing an umbrella.

What strikes me, every time, is that repair is the only relationship with an object that requires you to understand it. Buying does not. Using does not. Discarding certainly does not. Repair is the one that asks how the thing is actually put together, and it is the one we have arranged our economy to make least convenient.

He charges forty rupees. It costs more than that in bus fare for most of his customers to reach him. They come anyway.

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Coverage Science Craft Essay

About the author

Pihoo

Staff Writer

Writes about craft, objects, and the people who keep them working.

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Discussion 8 comments

Comments are closed on this article.

Shobha Rangappa Pinned 3 hours ago

Nineteen public consultations and counting. The treatment-plant utilisation number is the one nobody publishes, and it is the only one that would tell you whether any of this works.

Pihoo Author 2 hours ago

They published it at 4:15pm. I've added it to the piece as an update rather than a correction, since nothing in the original was wrong; it was simply unanswered.

Vasanthi Kumar 5 hours ago

The cascade point deserves more attention than it usually gets. Restoring a lake in isolation is a real improvement to that lake and almost nothing to the system.

Comment removed

A. Menon 6 hours ago

Even so, the diversion drains are doing something; they buy time while the plants get built.

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