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Ever since I heard The Grateful Dead, I've thought of trucking as something kind of romantic.
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And yet, it's also deeply poignant.
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On the one hand, the wide open highways, meeting new people, seeing new places, a kind of freedom
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from the fetters that tie down most of us.
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On the other hand, a life without roots, no sense of family, traveling all over, yes,
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but constrained in a box with wheels.
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You'd think truckers in India would know this vast and beautiful land more than most of
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But do they spend their time traveling in a moving cocoon, always on the move, yes,
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but perennially trapped?
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For a trucker, the journey is the destination, and as usually a bug and not a feature.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Bhatma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Rajat Ubhekar, who got this strange keda a few years ago of traveling
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around India in a truck.
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And that's exactly what he did.
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He went from Mumbai to Kashmir, and then to the Northeast, and then to South India, hitchhiking
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on trucks, making friends with truck drivers, getting a sense of their lives and journeys.
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And he wrote about it in a wonderful book called Truck Day India, A Hitchhiker's Guide
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I was delighted to have Rajat on The Seen and the Unseen as we battled through a litany
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of technical issues, as if we were recording from a moving truck.
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When I record remotely, I do so using a software called Zencastr, and I also keep Zoom on mute
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so my guests and I can see each other and pick up visual cues.
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For this recording, first Zencastr didn't work, and then it did, but Zoom did not.
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Then we tried Google Hangouts and that didn't work, and we tried Skype and that didn't
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work, and then we tried WhatsApp video call, and we could only record half a session.
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So we resumed a couple of days later, when Rajat's internet behaved itself, and we finally
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wrapped up the episode.
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Our conversation was a hell of a trip, and I mean that in a good way.
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If you enjoy listening to The Seen and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Seen and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe,
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and hopefully yours as well.
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But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
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Although The Seen and the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
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up to the insane engagement level of podcasts, and I do many many hours of deep research
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for each episode, besides all the logistics of producing the show myself.
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Scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel, and so on.
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So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping this thing going, and that involves you.
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My proposition for you is this.
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For every episode of The Seen and the Unseen that you enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee, or
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even a lavish lunch, whatever you feel is worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support, and contributing an amount
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This is not a subscription.
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The Seen and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps, and at sceneunseen.in.
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This is just a gesture of appreciation, help keep this thing going, sceneunseen.in slash
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Rajat, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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You know, I have to tell our listeners that I am getting a sense of the rhythm of Rajat's
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book, because in his book, there's a lot of waiting and a lot of hanging around as, you
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know, waiting for trucks and waiting for traffic jams to resolve themselves, because we started
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this recording exactly one hour late, because we had technical issues.
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First, the Zencastr wasn't working, then the Zoom wasn't working, then we tried a bunch
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of other things, and we finally got on to recording.
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But never mind, better late than never, and you know, maybe that's the enjoyment of the
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journey comes from all these little moments in between, though I think, you know, technical
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glitches don't add anything to one's life.
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So Rajat, before we start talking about your fascinating book, tell me a little bit about
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your personal journey, because, you know, you are an engineer who then did journalism
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and won an award for it, who then went traveling around India on trucks, and you have just
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joined the civil services.
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So take me through this sort of very interesting journey of yours and how you came to writing
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per se, because that sort of seems to be the one great passion of your life, writing and
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Yeah, it's definitely been an interesting journey so far.
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So as far as my personal background goes, I basically hail from Karnataka, coastal Karnataka.
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I was born in Bharkal, and brought up largely in Mumbai, part of my schooling was also in
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a military school in Sathara, scenic school Sathara, and after that, I joined IIT Kanpur
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where I studied electrical engineering.
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Writing and reading have been abiding passions in my life, as far as I remember, right from
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my childhood, I remember scouring these second hand ratiwalas, trying to find some Amal Chitra
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Katha or any novel that would excite me, so right since childhood I have been interested
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The reason why I went into engineering was of course like many other kids who got decent
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marks, it made the most sense, and I don't regret it at all because a background in science
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I feel is definitely helpful everywhere, especially in any field.
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Also I met some amazing people in IIT K, who continue to be close to me, so no regrets
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In my third year or fourth year, I finally decided that I wanted to get into journalism.
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Essentially it was, I did not want to do a desk job in my early twenties, I had this
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deep hunger to see as much of India as possible.
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And part of that hunger also led me to Kanpur in the first place, because I am from Bombay
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essentially, but I did not want to be stuck in Bombay, close to my parents forever, so
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I decided to join IIT K. So it lets this connect throughout my life I see about wanting to
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see as much of India as possible.
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And I worked for a year after graduation in a management consultancy, got a decent job,
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so I thought I'll give the corporate world a try before pitching it all together, just
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to make sure I won't regret it, just for my own satisfaction.
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And after a year or so I joined the Asian College of Journalism, and from there on I
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worked as a business journalist for a couple of years in Bombay.
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And while working as a business journalist, I really decided that I had to go on this
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The seed of that idea I think had been with me right since my college days.
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So as I write in the book, in my first year one truck driver had very kindly rescued us
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from a light while we were stranded on a highway near Shimla.
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And that sort of stayed with me and the idea of their lives, it appealed to me.
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And I thought that in my early twenties I should do something like that, but it crystallized
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only by the time I was around 23-24.
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And one fine day I walk into my editor's office, I tell her, ma'am, see I have this crazy idea
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in my mind, I want to travel across India, so please I want to quit right now.
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So because obviously you won't give me a holiday for like 3-4 months.
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But she turned out to be much more sensible than I was.
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She suggested that I write a six-part series for the magazine and I jumped at it, I mean
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I thought I wouldn't get a better chance, I mean you are getting paid your salary while
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you are sort of exploring India by truck.
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So I thought I couldn't get better and later at one point even Indian Oil Corporation sort
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So it all worked out somehow, I was lucky.
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And that's been my broad journey and apart from that, recently I have cleared the UPSC
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exams, so let's see where that takes me.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, you might just, after all the things you wrote about sort of the predatory
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state in your book, not in so many words, those are my words, but that's how a lot of
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the book came across, it will kind of be sweetly ironic, your sort of joining that service
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and hopefully making things better.
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Now I know it's kind of futile often to ask a reader what kind of writing do they like
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because I think a lot of readers who are drawn to this voracious hunger for just reading
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anything that they can get their hands on, it's not a fair question that your reading
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will naturally tend to be eclectic, but given that you also love to travel and love seeing
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new places and all of that, which of course books does, books are a window to other places,
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but was there also an attraction therefore to people who write about travel and write
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about going to places, like were there models for you?
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Did you ever read a writer and think, huh, that's the kind of thing I want to write and
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So one book which I distinctly remember leaving an impression on me was something I read when
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I was in ACJ, it's this book called A Free Man by Aman Sethi.
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So what that book showed me was that it is possible to write about India's working class,
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its informal economy, so to say, in a sensitive manner, in an entertaining manner, in an informative
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manner, because the lives of us middle class people are so cocooned in many ways, we are
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unaware of the varied struggles, the various jugars which people employ in India to live
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out their life day to day.
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So that book, which is about a bunch of daily wage laborers in Delhi, when I read that book,
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I thought I have to absolutely write something about truck drivers, I mean, their life is
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in some ways more fascinating than that of a daily wage laborer also, because the kind
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of landscapes they're exposed to, the kind of characters they're exposed to on a daily
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basis seem to me to be material fit for a book.
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And I could say that book definitely was a huge influence on me.
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And apart from that, if as far as the writing style is concerned, I veer towards the more
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simple writing rather than more flowery writing, which is difficult to pull off, I mean, except
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for a few exceptions like Bodehouse, who can pull off that sort of writing so beautifully.
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I have always been attracted towards simplicity in writing.
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So as far as models around that, those are concerned Hemingway definitely, whom I read
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during the final years of my college, was quite an influence.
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Yeah, that would be it.
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Yeah, I mean, come to my arms, because I teach this course on clear writing and I often when
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I talk about writing in that, you know, I cite George Orwell's famous quote, good prose
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is like a window pane, the whole point being that the window pane is a means to an end
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and therefore, you know, prose like a window pane should just be clear, window pane is
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supposed to show you what's on the other side and not draw attention to itself.
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And the example I gave of an exception to that is the same one you gave, which is Bodehouse,
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where, you know, in his case, the beautiful things that he does with the prose is an end
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in itself and that's fine, but one should not get carried away by that because everybody
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cannot be Bodehouse and I like the clarity in your style and also the sort of the conversational
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feel of it and, you know, you throw in a lot of sort of light touches of humor at just perfect
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places, which kind of really worked for me.
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Was there a process that you went through in sort of finding your voice, as it were,
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the voice of the book, so to say, or is it something that, you know, was very clear from
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the start or did you sort of have to experiment a bit and, you know, write a bit till you
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discovered what the right voice would be?
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Initially, I found myself getting bogged down in these long winded sentences, I mean, the
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initial process was quite a bit of a struggle, but my basic aim with this book was to appeal
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I mean, I did not want the reader, whoever he or she may be, to get bored at any point
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in the sense, even though I had some interesting facts to share or anything which I find to
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be interesting, but essentially the reader may not because it's too long winded or it's
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been going on for a while.
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So in that sense, it went through a constant process of refinement, the end goal being
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it should hold the reader's attention and we are so easily distracted these days, right?
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And I think the job of writing is to make it as easy as possible for the reader and
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that is the most challenging part.
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The process largely consisted of defining the text.
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I do not believe in the draft system, I mean, I don't usually maintain too many drafts,
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I get too confused at the end if there are seven or eight of them.
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So I typically just tweak, tweak, tweak until, I mean, it's never really finished, but until
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it meets a certain level of satisfaction, until then I keep tweaking.
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That's my broad process when I'm writing.
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I was struck by this quote at the start of your book by John Steinbeck, where he says
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quote, we find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, a trip takes us, stop
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quote, which would appear to the reader as written in the context of the book that is
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But it also struck me that it has a broader resonance and that's sort of what I want to
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ask you about in the sense that you said you did engineering and engineering has its own
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sort of subcultures and lingos and ways of speaking and ways of thinking about the world.
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Similarly, after that, you go to the ACJ and you get into journalism and journalism also
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has its own little subcultures depending on where you are.
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And then you go around the country with these truckers and there, as you've described so
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beautifully, there are all these little subcultures and rituals and these worlds that you inhabit,
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which are in fact, as you've shown in the book, different from place to place.
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It's one thing in the north, another thing in the northeast and so on and so forth.
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And this kind of got me to thinking about how our experiences shape us so profoundly
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because it struck me while reading the book that some of these subcultures would have
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nothing in common with the other ones, like the engineering subculture and say the trucking
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subculture where there are a few things in common, such as the technology where people
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use WhatsApp and make Facebook friends from other countries.
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But apart from that, the worlds are so different, they relate to other people so differently
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So do you find that as sort of a visitor in these different worlds, that you can take
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a step back and look at your friends in each of these worlds and that their worldview in
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some ways constricted because of the relative narrowness of their experiences?
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That's a great question, Amit and I 100% agree with you.
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I mean, there's this great quote in the book, English August, actually, that I never allow
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two of my friends from different circles to ever meet.
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That would be two worlds colliding because we often have these little bubbles, right?
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What I see the world as is composed of these little bubbles who think that the entire world
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I mean, many of my friends are in the startup world and the startup bubble is another world
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I mean, when I go to meet them in Bangalore sometimes, it's like I stepped into another
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At the same time, I mean, journalism, of course, is one of the reasons why I got into journalism
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was to sort of partake of these different bubbles, at least get a glimpse of these different
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worlds and expand my worldview through that, that was one of the reasons I got into journalism.
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And yes, I would definitely say that having this sort of limited worldview, often I've
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seen it among my engineering bachelors also, the world is very limited for the options
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themselves are so limited after graduation, either you join the corporate world or you
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get into a startup or you start studying for the UPS or you go for a master's abroad.
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And it's essentially limited to these options.
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And I would say, yes, the trip of traveling with truckers across India opened my eyes
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in so many ways, which I hope to have shared with the reader through the book.
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And I hope the reader learns something about the many Indias that are country in my books.
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It's also fascinating for me, like I remember back in my days as a professional poker player,
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I would play with or I would have to play with all kinds of, I used to play the underground
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I have to play with all kinds of people I would otherwise not interact with.
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So whether it's a group of builders in Vashi, I've played with film stars in Varsova and
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one group I used to play with, there were people who had grown up going to your local
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RSS Shaka every week and were hardcore sort of sanghis in that sense and absolutely lovely
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And what happens in the culture is that, given whichever bubble we are part of, we'll sometimes
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demonize people from different bubbles and not sort of be completely devoid of a deeper
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understanding of why other people are the way they are.
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And they are also three-dimensional and they contain multitudes and all of that.
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Given that you were into writing, given that you wanted to travel and therefore all of
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these different interests and passions seem to have coalesced towards this particular
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journey that you took, but what drew you to the idea of this particular book?
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Like you mentioned, the truck driver helped you when you were stranded in Shimla a long
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What in particular was sort of the expectation that you took into it and did that differ
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from your experience eventually?
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Because sometimes I imagine what can happen is that you can go into something with a romantic
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notion that, hey, I'm going to travel the country in a truck and I'm going to soak
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up all the different cultural influences and at the end of it, I'll have this masterpiece.
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And then you actually go and you're just sitting around for 12 hours waiting at a traffic jam
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at a Naka with guys who want nothing but to view porn on your phone.
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So were there sort of moments like that when expectations differed from reality or did
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you go into it with the attitude that everything is an unknown unknown, I'll just finish the
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journey and then I'll start forming narratives?
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I mean, my expectations while I was going for the journey, my only expectation was that
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hopefully I'll come out of it alive.
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I did not have any preconceived notions.
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I guess I must have shared some of the sort of stereotypes that exist about truckers subconsciously
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that they are drunkards or I know all stereotypes one may say that are rooted in some form of
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So I may have shared those, but I bent in with a totally blank slate and prepared mentally
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for all sorts of physical privations, all sorts of troubles on the way and broadly lived
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up to those expectations in the sense I was right to not expect anything out of it.
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I mean, how I set out on the journey itself, I mean, the first trucker I hitchhiked with,
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he was someone who was connected to me by a friend who knew someone who was working
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So that was through a connection.
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After that, I was essentially on my own.
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I had no idea how I would find another trucker, where I would go.
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So that was a huge unknown out there and it was a source of considerable anxiety to begin
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with, because I had no idea how I would actually manage it in a practical sense.
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But as the journey progressed, slowly my expectations also started becoming more clear in the sense
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what can I expect from people, though they were also always belied, I mean, all these
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expectations were never really there because truckers, there are hundreds of different
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kinds of truckers, the personalities of everyone differs and basically every truck that you
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get inside is another world, I mean, the people are different, their stories are different.
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I mean, that's what I really enjoy about India in some way.
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I mean, there is this particular vantage point of the Indian middle class or the upper middle
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class, which sort of views the rest of India as the great unwashed, I mean, the homogenous
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mass of people who essentially are there to serve us.
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But what I really enjoy seeing is in the particular histories that are contained within each person,
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their own life stories, their own background, their family history.
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I mean, everything says so much about India and it's like a great learning experience
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and meeting someone outside of your social circle, getting to really know their background,
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it's an education and that's what this trip was.
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I mean, I was hoping it would be an education and yes, it definitely was.
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And you know, in our normal lives or rather in our sort of regular lives, I would not
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say this is not normal in that sense, but in our regular lives, we are all sort of constantly
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anxious about how other people perceive us.
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And in most of our lives that anxiety is about we want to seem knowledgeable and sophisticated
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and smart and all of that.
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But I imagine here that it's a different kind of anxiety because you know, there is a difference
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of class and privilege here and for you, the tension must have been how do I fit in?
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I don't want them to feel as if I'm coming at them from a place that is above them, you
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know, not just in terms of class or whatever, but even your approach and all that.
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So how did you sort of, you know, deal with that?
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Was there that anxiety that how do I how do I fit in?
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Should I joke with them?
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What kind of language should I use?
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How did you navigate all of those things?
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That anxiety definitely was there to begin with.
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So what I did was before setting out on the journey itself, I visited a couple of truck
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There's this huge one in Kadamboli and another one in Wadala and I interacted with the truckers
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over there just to see get a sense of what they are like in reality and the kind of warmth
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and generosity that I saw even there really played a big part in reassuring that if your
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intentions are genuine, if you don't condescend to them and if you don't patronize them, they
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are perfectly good people who will answer all your questions happily because they have
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so many grievances inside them over the years which no one has ever cared for or asked or
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addressed in any way that if there's someone who's asking them genuine questions about
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what problems they face, what their life has been like, they are more than happy to answer.
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So I went in with the expectation that I should just be a genuine person.
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If my intentions are I don't have any vested interests and if I actually go there and if
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I do care about their lives in some way, that comes across when you're interacting with
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What I've realized is that your eyes and your smile, they reveal a lot about you and about
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your intentions and other human beings can definitely see that.
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You know I'm reminded of the title of this great book which came out a few decades ago
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by Alan Sillito called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and it seemed you know
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you could also have something called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Trucker and is that part
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of the reason like I'm assuming when you say that they were warmer and you know nicer towards
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you than you might have expected or than this you know the middle class stereotypes about
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the unwashed might lead you to believing.
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Do you think that's part of the reason is that they're always on the road, those personal
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connections aren't really happening like the way you've kind of described the mini worlds
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of each of these truckers, it seems like you know there'll be two or three people traveling
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together in a truck and that's like you know that's their whole world and a lot of other
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stuff is peripheral and they must be sort of craving to talk to other people.
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You know is that a sort of sense also that you got of the trucker's life?
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Yes, I think that you're right because most of the truckers I felt were very lonely in
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the, I mean it's a lonely job and especially when you are alone like so many truckers in
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India travel alone, they won't even have a khalasi.
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So when you're alone it's an immensely lonely job, a monotonous job with few distractions,
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I mean you stop and have some kutka, that's your break, you have some chai and then chew
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on some kutka, that's pretty much your break and when someone like me for instance asks
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then it gets into the vehicle, it's not only good company I mean it's just you get to unload
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some of the baggage that you have accumulated over the years in the truck.
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So definitely that did play a part in shaping their attitudes towards me as this sort of
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privileged person in their midst.
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Yeah I mean one of the things that I was kind of struck by curiosity for and your book gave
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so many fascinating glimpses of it was what is the interior life of a trucker?
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You know and obviously there's no sort of one answer to this but I was struck by this
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you know fascinating quote from someone called Shyam who you said was a man of few words
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and at one point when you ask him that why did you come into trucking, he says this little
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bit which I'm going to read out because I found it so fascinating where he says quote
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in a word music, in Kangra as a style I had many cousins who drove trucks, they would
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allow me to ride with them sometimes and play songs all along the way, those are some of
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the best memories I have, that's when I decided I should get into this line, drive trucks
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to distant places listening to music all along, I was not interested in studies all I wanted
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was my music stop quote and I found this so interesting and you talk about how you know
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all his music was so sort of carefully curated on you know the USB drive which he would have
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and so on and it's such a fascinating story and you think of how this person placed in
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a different social context could live a totally different life like someone with a passion
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for music born in a good family in Delhi or in a Bollywood family in Bombay would be a
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whole different thing and this person's way of indulging this passion is sort of to become
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a truck driver, at another point another trucker you ask the same question to another trucker
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somewhere else and he replied quote, arey what should I tell you, I've done almost everything
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that a man can do, I've been a truck driver, a tailor, a grape seller, a mechanic, a salesman
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and more, didn't stick to any job for more than two years but I'm old now, don't have
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energy left anymore stop quote and to this you commented on this by writing quote it's
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a sort of self description most working class men in India would have given if only someone
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asks them, India's informal sector does have a way of making ordinary people multifaceted
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stop quote and it struck me here that there are you know you talk a lot in your book about
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a particular kind of jugar which is that you're figuring out a way to make something work
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whether it is you know cooling bottles of water by putting them on the windshield where
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the wind blows against them or another but it seems to me that even beyond the jugar
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of immediate functionality there is also a jugar of life where in a certain way given
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the poverty in this country, given the scarcities, given the lack of opportunities many people
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have you know which you know your whole life becomes a way of sort of going against different
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tides being buffeted this way and that way and all the time doing jugar, jugar, jugar,
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jugar, jugar so all of this whether you're a tailor or a grape seller or a mechanic or
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a truck driver it's different kinds of jugars at a time is this something you got a sense
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of and was there sort of a poignancy that you felt which I as a reader reading your
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wonderful book certainly did of you know the helplessness of these sort of lives and the
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fact that these guys are still so cheerful and they're going along and they're in whatever
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what was that sort of sense like?
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Yeah I mean the overwhelming sense that I get from my travels is that of wasted potential
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I see so many so many bright people I mean it's so obvious that they are bright given
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the right circumstances they could have become anything they wanted and that I feel is the
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fundamental tragedy of India the wasted potential whether it be in terms of sports whether it
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be in terms of intellect there's all kinds of talent out there people are so smart I
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mean we this kind of reduction of smartness to academic performance is does not do justice
#
to the various kinds of intelligence that Indians have and the point that you said about
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being multifaceted right that is something which record again and again I mean just to
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make ends meet people learn all kinds of skills they learn different languages they move to
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Kerala or Bihari will start speaking Malayalam like within a year so there's this enormous
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reservoir of talent out there which is both wasted day in and day out in India and I feel
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that it's definitely sad when I think about it but it's also a way to be free I mean you
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know the book that I talked about a free man by Amin Sethi that is essentially how often
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many people who live day to day they are just pursuing freedom I mean what we perceive as
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a job and as this lifestyle that we have to meet these are all constraints that bind us
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they're all pawns in some way but it could be argued that a truly free person is someone
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who does not have these large forces which are always keeping him constrained like there's
#
this good quote by Leonard Cohen like a bird on the wire like a child drunk in a midnight
#
choir I have tried in my way to be free and that quote really speaks to me and it sort
#
of encapsulates the lives of all these Indians that I met on the road you know another thing
#
that kind of made me very sad in the book was a sense of how you know world views can
#
be so constricted and constrained by what you experience I mean we spoke about it earlier
#
about these different subcultures and you know you described it as you know all these
#
bubbles which you know exist and don't intersect and obviously you know we can joke about how
#
IIT engineers bubble stops them from so many experiences and seeing whatever but in the
#
case of the truckers it seems even more poignant to me because once you get into that trucking
#
life which you know can happen when you're in your mid teens for example you know you've
#
spoken of people in the book coming into it as a khalasi a khalasi by the way for the
#
listeners is an apprentice to a truck driver who will ride around with him for two three
#
years and perform odd jobs and then eventually graduate to become a driver so that's your
#
guru shishya parampara in a sense of trucking and people become khalasis when they are in
#
their teens and from then it strikes me that what they know of the world is so limited
#
you know because many of them will have smartphones you know especially in the west and the south
#
as you pointed out a couple of truckers who were with had better smartphones than you
#
you know and there might be some influences coming from there but they are close to so
#
much of the world and one example of this which really stayed with me was you spoke
#
about a kashmiri truck driver who was explaining to you the problem between India and Pakistan
#
the problem of Kashmir and to him it all came down to apples he said the apples of Kashmir
#
are so good that Indians don't want the apples to go to Pakistan and Pakistan is closer and
#
that's why the army has to occupy Kashmir which is stunning which is stunning and yet
#
so rational for someone who is who may not have experienced or read about any of the
#
discord between these two countries and all of these big geopolitical currents other than
#
the beauty of these apples you know and appreciation for them and obviously there were different
#
trucking subcultures because you went to so many different places but is that something
#
that also kind of struck you and you know you know got you thinking while you were on
#
There is a certain degree of insularity among truckers because while we think of them as
#
these all India movers of goods the fact is their circle is quite limited they are mostly
#
hang out with people from their own caste or from their own village maximum from their
#
own region so across India there are these dhabas which specify what kind of dhaba they
#
are whether they are Rajasthani dhaba or a Bengal dhaba so then the truckers hailing
#
from these regions will specifically go only to these dhabas where they know that people
#
belonging to their region hang out and their goods are safe and their truck is safe so
#
their world is quite insular and I would say that interaction with other forces are usually
#
negative I mean any person outside their circle whom they interact with is either out there
#
to harass him or extort money from him so their perception of the outside world is not
#
necessarily very good because the kind of stigma that they have in society they are
#
regarded with hostility and suspicion at large I mean you take any random person off the
#
street to ask them their opinion about truckers it's very likely it's going to be negative
#
so they themselves also have this sort of distrust of the larger society and in many
#
ways they have also internalized this pariah status in society like one trucker whom I
#
met in Udaipur described himself as belonging to the Sethi Swi Jat which is essentially
#
someone who does not belong in a respectable society who is an outcast in some ways so
#
that sort of self description really struck me because they have internalized their lowly
#
status in society many of them in the south I met many proud truck drivers as well who
#
told me that we don't take shit from anyone whether it be the owner or the people so it's
#
not certainly not a homogenous thing but to a large extent yes they have internalized
#
their lowly status and are insular in ways which prevents them from seeing the larger
#
picture I mean you just look at the job they are doing right they are the larger picture
#
actually in a sense because they are the ones who are transporting goods everywhere they
#
are the logistics but they only get to see a small part of the whole picture right they
#
are essentially the supply chain which is our entire economy but they only ever get
#
to see a small part of it which is okay I need to load these goods here and deliver
#
it there it's like so many structural forces are preventing them from seeing the larger
#
picture in many ways yeah in fact you mentioned the 37th jaat thing and I was struck by the
#
full quote which is in your book where this person says to you 37th jaat is what we call
#
truck drivers and the 36th jaat is the transporters who take care of animals like us which seems
#
to be a very sort of a perceptive way of seeing yourself at the bottom of the food chain and
#
the guy above you you know that he is you know treating you like a pet but he is just
#
one rung above you and you also kind of know that which seems interesting and what also
#
sort of struck me is you spoke about how the status of truck drivers has actually diminished
#
over the decades like you know you have this bit where you are speaking about it you know
#
how a truck driver friend of yours is telling you about quote the notoriety truck drivers
#
enjoy in society and you write quote he tells me it wasn't always like this in the 80s
#
when his father started driving trucks the status of truckers was very different from
#
what it is now without power steering driving trucks was considered a relatively skilled
#
well-paid job much like crane and forklift operators now villagers largely cut off from
#
the world would welcome them as a harbingers of goods and news treat them to tea even invite
#
them into their homes and here you quoted that guy stop quote and this also drives
#
him how enormous the changes of the last couple of decades are not just in this context because
#
you talk of how villagers cut off from the world would look at getting their news from
#
truckers and now the villagers have smartphones and many ways of getting the news and they
#
don't need truckers anymore and at the same time trucking has lost some of the skill because
#
power steering and all these other things have come into it and at the same time truckers
#
in a sense are you know much more cut off from the world than these sort of villagers
#
it does just become an issue say with something that the older truckers deal with because
#
the older truckers might have gotten into the game at a time where it wasn't such a
#
lowly profession so to say or a saintessvijat and now you're a nobody and you're a nothing
#
like you spoke about one trucker who you know did a b-com and wanted to do management and
#
his father would not let him put him in the truck business and he is cursing his father
#
that what kind of a father would do that to his son yeah is there a difference in approach
#
and attitude between the older guys the middle-aged guys the middle-aged guys of my age and maybe
#
the young guys of your age yeah so among the older guys i have asked them i mean what i
#
used to ask them was what do you think you're so experienced we have like so many years
#
of experience on the road doesn't mean anything to the people who are hiring you and that
#
is where the essential problem lies because this sort of experience does not have any
#
value in fact what they told you was that i am old so these guys will discard me they
#
want someone young to work longer hours or sleep less and get managed with lesser sleep
#
so there is this immense sense of frustration that you know i have worked all my life it's
#
like a dead-end job right there's no avenue to go up you once you start as a truck driver
#
it's not like you will get any increment or there will be any sort of change in your
#
designation and that sense of frustration was immense especially in the middle-aged drivers
#
who see that after all these years of slogging their savings are negligible their children
#
are also not as educated as they would have liked them to be many of them have ended up
#
joining them only and that sense was there the younger ones they were more more of hustlers
#
i would say they were they were just the attitude was the same in the sense that i am trying
#
this out for now but might move on to something else so one of the truckers whom i met was
#
treating this as sort of treating the job of driving trucks as practice for his driving
#
test to become a bus driver so they have other ambitions they have other they know there
#
are other avenues out there to earn money and they are also keenly aware that becoming
#
a truck driver is like you are a nobody in society you are likely to be looked down and
#
judged and harassed and extorted they are very very well aware of that and they are
#
constantly looking out for other avenues i mean there's one survey which was conducted
#
recently by save life foundation which said that around 85 percent of the truckers would
#
not recommend trucking as a job to their family members or their relatives or whoever so that's
#
the kind of status there is but you are right in the early days in the 80s and 90s 80s were
#
like the proper boom decade for trucking i mean there are some figures which i found
#
out about commercial vehicle production it really boomed from the 80s to the 90s and
#
this can be seen also from the small town of namakkal where they build these trucks
#
where the number of people employed jumped from 5000 to 17000 in just 10 years there
#
was over a three-fold rise in the people employed in making trucks and while we like to think
#
of the 90s as the real sort of liberalization and boom decade but it's clear that the 80s
#
there was a lot of build up in terms of economic growth in the 80s itself and there's no better
#
correlator right of economic growth like commercial vehicles i mean they are the best way possibly
#
to figure out how the economy at large is doing so yeah i hope that answers your question
#
yeah and and what you said about the older truck drivers is also kind of illustrative
#
of you know a mistake young people often make and old people warn about where you assume
#
that you are making some small decision and it is not a big deal for example i will you
#
know i can't find a job right now i'll start driving a truck let's see how it goes and
#
before you know it 25 years have passed and there's nothing else you can do and your whole
#
life has gone by and you're kind of stuck and like you said it's not even like a career track
#
that you get increments and you get promoted from intern all the way to ceo if you're driving a
#
truck you're driving a truck you're not a ceo at any point especially when you know so much of
#
the industry like you pointed out is you know not corporatized at all like you spoke about how i
#
think 75 percent or three-fourths of the trucking in india is by owners who own five trucks or less
#
so it's all just a bunch of really small outfits and there aren't structures within which you can
#
rise i want to you know go back a little bit to that whole question of sort of caste and divisions
#
that we sort of spoke about like one on the whole you pointed out about how truckers see themselves
#
as you know santhi swijat or the lowest of all cars but you've also spoken about you know when
#
you were traveling through the north the divisions between punjabis versus harianvis and jats where
#
punjabis are like we were the original truckers and it was a glamorous life and then these harianvis
#
and jats came and messed it up and look at hariana and how women are treated there which also we'll
#
come back to later and then later on you know when you're in the northeast you speak about say the
#
tribalism at imfal where you write quote a sort of trust deficit is palpable in the air here men
#
size each other up verily seeking answers to the one question preying on their minds who are you
#
are you indian or tribal if tribal which tribal if naga wish naga or methi or are you a mia bengali
#
muslim the answer to that question is what determines the nature of further engagement
#
this breakdown of interpersonal trust means people tend to stick with their own ensuring this vicious
#
cycle of identity politics and ethnic strife continues indefinitely stop quote and this is
#
of course not just a problem of the trucking ecosystem but our society itself per se but is
#
this sort of enhanced or like i would imagine in trucking it could go both ways that because
#
uh you all share that common burden of the loneliness of being the long-distance trucker
#
as it were that can bring you together despite all the other divisions but i can also imagine
#
that why this sort of tribalism can be something that you look for to find comfort zones which
#
you find among people like yourself and therefore that can get uh enhanced so what was your sense
#
of this during your travels my sense was that uh you know this whole idea of india india exists
#
in our mind largely for the vast bunch of uh people you uh like an andhra trucker going to
#
bhuhati he does not trust the people he meets over there i mean we are an extremely low trust
#
society that is one fundamental thing i learned i mean because uh they are constantly searching
#
searching for someone whom either they have kinship relationships with or some sort of loose
#
regional affiliation is also fine but uh this trust deficit is just uh immense and until the
#
last part until say the 19th century also even the early 20th century uh people would say that
#
you are going to somewhere in the decan would say i'm going to hindustan or like i'm going to
#
i mean that's that's the sort of world that existed right and that's still done i mean
#
truckers are the ones who actually have to travel others the others don't need to travel i mean
#
either by train or something but these guys are constantly in places where they are not amongst
#
their own and i would say that that only encourages regionalism that the whole larger part about
#
class class solidarity right that does not come into the picture any sense of class solidarity
#
that i tried to find was absent there was none uh they are because they're highly divided firstly
#
along lines of ownership itself i mean who will you rise up against if you want to say
#
for the union or you want to negotiate for better wages who will you rise against you all have
#
different owners you can't even speak the same language even going from andhra to tamil or do i
#
struggle because many of the truckers i have found were tamil i mean they couldn't understand
#
the union how will these guys how are they ever expected to come under one banner then there's
#
of course caste religion all kinds of things and this is the prime reason why we don't have any
#
sort of trucker union in india like i recently saw the irish man and in that i was struck by how
#
powerful a truck union leader can be i mean if that is the sort of potential that exists to build
#
to bring the country to a standstill if you have that sort of influence over a constituency like
#
truckers you can be immensely powerful in the country that's what i realized after watching
#
irish man but that sort of thing is unimaginable in india the only uh sort of organization which
#
claims to represent the truckers which is aimtc all india motor transport farmers
#
that is also an association of owners who then pass off their own interests as the interests of
#
the truckers they employ so uh that's how it works in india one of the sort of striking anecdotes in
#
your book was where you stop at a dhaba when you're going up north you're making the journey up north
#
and you stop at a dhaba and there's a little kid who's running around taking the orders
#
and you have this trucker taking the kid on his lap and just playing with his genitals openly in
#
front of everybody while everybody is laughing and even the kid is squealing and laughing
#
and you pointed out how it is sort of a natural thing it wasn't out of the ordinary there and you
#
wrote quote is shocking how outside is liberal havens attitudes towards children in many parts
#
of india seem to have ossified in the medieval era child sexual abuse is terrifyingly normalized
#
unlike america with childhood is disappearing with the advent of mass tv and internet
#
it seems the concept of childhood never really gained mass currency in the first place uh stock
#
quote and it struck me that you also elaborated on how uh this sort of sanctity of childhood is
#
this thing that is separate from adulthood as something that you know carries with it so much
#
innocence and then gradually you come of age and all of that and all of that is a luxury that is
#
only really there even conceptually for elites like us and for much of india it's not the case
#
for much of india the way people relate to kids is in a very instrumental way like you know in
#
earlier centuries it was common to think of children only as a resource if you were in a
#
time of famine you would you know sell your kid and that's one of the things that you commented
#
on happening here so is that something you noted sort of repeatedly while you were going what do
#
you like was it something that struck others as unusual or that was a normal for them and and is
#
it something that you got used to after a period in time that yeah this is it's natural for them to
#
think like this and behave like this so i mean across indian highways the all dhaapas literally
#
all dhaapas will employ these child waiters there will be two three of them and they will keep
#
running around collecting orders and delivering stuff so definitely i did get used to it because
#
there was no option in the sense uh the sort of attitude is so all permeating in the sense it's
#
if you look there are 10 million child laborers at this time and that is just staggering and
#
in spite of say the right to education which makes it compulsory and also free there is
#
still this immense resistance right i mean because of various social economic reasons due to poverty
#
all these reasons there is the resistance to enroll people children in school and that also
#
derives i feel from a deep cultural way of looking at children itself as these pure entities who i
#
mean of course in middle class circles it would be scandalous to suggest that they don't think of
#
their children as you know innocent being but uh largely they do i mean the government itself is
#
uh sort of uh changing the laws right to recognize this reality i mean right now children under the
#
age of 14 are allowed to work in family outfits or they are actually allowed like after school you
#
can work in uh in your family business which is which can be anything from pd making or
#
working in the kirana store that your family owns so right from that stage children as this
#
economic resource that attitude is there and if we were forced to even amend the rt to recognize
#
that fact uh it says a lot but uh yeah i would say it's a very difficult thing to really get
#
rid of this attitude because as long as there are economic compulsions like you always say it's all
#
incentives and as long as there are economic compulsions it's very unlikely that this attitude
#
yeah and i'm reminded of these you know the child armies of west africa where
#
you have militias made up of these 10 year olds and 11 year olds responding to a completely
#
different kind of incentive which also sort of tells you how uh our modern notion of children
#
is so relatively recent i can also see why uh you know many of uh sort of what the middle class
#
would think of is a great unwashed to use uh your phrase from earlier in this uh podcast would be so
#
uh distrustful of government because for example we speak of the right to education act but that
#
is of course a joke which does nothing for children and if anything made things uh uh harder for them
#
and similarly i think one of the things that um i'm sure these guys intuitively get is that laws
#
don't do anything that your lived reality is something completely different and you know i
#
had written about this many years ago all of us are sort of uh distressed by child labor but there
#
was an old oxfam study on this situation in bangladesh where you know there were factories
#
which had child workers and there was international outrage about that and about 30 000 child workers
#
were laid off and uh you know many of the kids who were laid off actually didn't starve to death
#
you know uh many of the girls became prostitutes uh similarly there was a 1995 study by unicef
#
which showed that you know a bunch of well-meaning people began a boycott of carpets made in nepal
#
using child labor and because of that about 5000 to 7000 nepali girls turned to prostitution
#
because what was otherwise a better option working in a carpet factory was denied to them
#
so you know we elites often think that hey an easy option is that you get the state to legislate and
#
to make a law and that said these people will stop treating their kids badly but the realities
#
behind uh uh why all these things happen is something sort of uh completely uh different
#
and far more disturbing moving on from there it also you also commented at one point on the
#
absence of women in the landscapes that you described like at one point you wrote quote
#
the first thing that strikes one about the highways of india and rajasthan in particular
#
is a creepy wholesale absence of women not a single sighting of the female form for miles and miles
#
to the extent that when you finally see one idling by the road you tend to assume she's a sex worker
#
stop quote and later on of course you point out the exception to this which is when you go to
#
nagaland and uh you know that's a little bit different but otherwise in the roads of india
#
you don't uh you know see uh women on the highways at all how does this sort of affect the way that
#
truckers look at intergender relationships are women merely uh sort of instrumental for them
#
that when they can get hold of one they want uh you know sex which they don't otherwise get so much
#
how does all of that sort of feature in their mental landscapes um i would say you know this
#
is not just limited to truckers i mean so much so many of the men i know right since childhood
#
they have interacted with women with only instrumental ends in mind i mean it could be as
#
little as uh taking a notebook during uh school uh but that's the extent of uh their interaction
#
with women and that is the vast majority of men in india i mean they are stunted as far as
#
interacting with the opposite sex world they are so many social forces have sort of come together
#
to inculcate this attitude in them i would say yes among truckers there is this uh in some ways
#
i would say they do look at women as this exotic object i mean i wouldn't say uh it's purely as an
#
object of uh sex but someone who's so far removed from their world and who will essentially never
#
never ever enter their world except as a wife as a long-suffering wife or uh as a prostitute with
#
whom you have a quick high-rate alliance but uh that is the extent of their view about women and
#
uh i would say even so many of the men i met uh in iity were uh stunted in similar ways
#
that uh carry that is one common thread in fact this whole idea of a masculine world i mean i
#
have inhabited many of these masculine spaces earlier at a military school later in iity and
#
this uh even talking it's ever totally a masculine world but uh that whole my experience in those
#
world was something that kind of attracted me to this world also i wanted to see what uh that was
#
like and that is one of the reasons i could fit in also i would say yeah and that's kind of uh
#
fascinating and all iit students listening to this uh possibly would be nodding their head in
#
agreement that it's uh exactly uh like that and that sort of leads me to wondering that how quick
#
are we to judge other people like it would be fair to say i think therefore that most indian men
#
are misogynistic and sexist and you know in their kind of approach to the world and at different
#
levels they have hatred and lack of empathy for the other whoever the other might be in their
#
definition and you then have to wonder that how much of this uh do you actually ascribe to someone
#
being a bad person per se because if this is a world that you've grown up in and this is
#
all that you know and you don't know any other way of looking at someone differently
#
you may have never experienced the joy of you know that kind of a conversation or that kind
#
of companionship that could say come with falling in love with someone and then building a life
#
together or whatever and it just seems to me that it is so easy for many of us who are much more
#
fortunate and have more exposure to kind of sit in judgment over them whether they are truckers
#
or from iit what is though i think people in iit have less of an excuse to be a sexist quite
#
honestly so what's your feeling on this i would say yes that is uh we are on something there
#
because even today 95 percent of marriages are arranged marriages like you know since you're a
#
kid since you've developed some hormones and you know you know that you are going to be by your
#
parents are going to choose your uh wife for you and that is it's not even a question over there
#
for the vast majority it's not like you have an option or there's no debate on that question
#
so that is the first factor which it invests every relationship we have with the other sex
#
it's basically pointless right having any relationship then because you can't really
#
marry a woman because your parents are going to choose one for you and so what what basis is
#
there on which to connect and then it's also a matter of suspicion in the sense that if you are
#
talking to strange women and the constraints that are there on the women i do not even want to
#
get into because i can't imagine the level of seclusion that they often find themselves in
#
across conservative households in india so i would say yes i feel bad also for men i mean it's
#
uh like you said a combination of various forces have conspired to uh you know develop this attitude
#
in them but uh like you said i mean it's uh not and it's their responsibility also to overcome
#
those attitudes i mean which many of them do try or are at least forced to try due to this uh
#
prevailing sensitivity towards women and it's everywhere right right from the government
#
policies and that sort of bombardment i think can be effective to some level hopefully yeah
#
though i feel that even today a lot of that bombardment is uh you know about empowering
#
women almost takes a paternalistic and condescending attitude towards it and you almost
#
you know that you should worship women because they are your mother they are your wife always
#
you know setting them in relation to men and you know which you know doesn't go that much further
#
towards uh sort of respecting their autonomy and this reminds me of something interesting that
#
Sringda Poonam said to me when she was on my show i think over two years ago and Sringda has of
#
course written this great book called dreamers about uh young indians and she pointed out that
#
how in many of the small towns of india young men are increasingly bewildered because uh young women
#
are more assertive uh about what they want and so on and so forth and the men don't have any clue
#
of how to deal with it because there is nothing in the culture that teaches you what to do in
#
such situations i mean we think of education as in a narrow sense is coming from your school or
#
college but really education comes at you from your culture including something like bollywood
#
where voeing a woman is basically always stalking a woman right so you have absolutely uh no way of
#
sort of figuring out what is a normal relationship and you know that struck me as interesting the
#
other aspect of and you know i spent a bunch of my experience of reading the book kind of slowing
#
down and trying to think about what is the interior life of a trucker you know what is he like like
#
okay we can talk about all of these attitudes maybe towards children and towards women we can
#
talk about the loneliness you have described in great detail at different points of things
#
that they do within their trucking within the ecosystem of their own little truck where
#
somebody might play a lot of music and you know there'll be different things going on and what i
#
also started realizing through the book is that they also build up their own sort of mythologies
#
as we do all you know they have all their ghost stories there was a fascinating story about the
#
truck driver who got married to a bhutni as you put it that and i'm just going to relate that
#
for my listeners because it's such a great story and it tells you what and india actually has a
#
horde of great folk tales around these subjects which most of us aren't even aware of but the
#
story basically was a truck drivers going on the road and there is this a ghost basically a young
#
woman who he chikes for a ride and he gives her a lift and then he falls in love with her and he
#
marries her and they're living a happy life together and then one day his neighbors tell
#
him that listen we never see her outside the house she never like leaves the rubbish outside
#
or whatever we just don't see her at all so he's like what is the mystery how does no one else ever
#
spot this woman so one day he goes inside his house when he's supposed to be at work and he
#
sees that he sees a bunch of disconnected bones in the kitchen cooking something and she immediately
#
realizes what what has happened and she goes into his arms and she says i only deceived you because
#
you loved me so much but now goodbye and she disappears or something i'm sorry if that's a
#
digression but i just found that such a lovely and almost moving story a truck driver in love
#
with a ghost and similarly these there are these other sort of urban legends which they believe in
#
like you spoke about how truck drivers are talking about highway robberies and they point out that
#
in one particular place these people not only you know overtake you make you stop and they rob you
#
but then they also operate on you and take your kidneys and that's basically it which sounds
#
incredibly implausible but kind of fascinating tell me a little bit about these interior mythologies
#
because we all need stories to keep us alive and relatively fortunate elite people like you and me
#
will have our own set of stories that keep us alive that this is what the politics of today is
#
x versus y that is a geopolitics this is what is happening there but their uh sort of internal
#
worlds which you know are formed by entirely different narratives and stories tell me what
#
kind of sense you got of that while on your travels ghost stories definitely highways lend
#
themselves very well to ghost stories because all kinds i mean 1.5 lakh people die every year in
#
accidents most of them are probably looking forward to a long life so they are essentially
#
unfulfilled souls who can then you know stop the highways looking for some victim or in vengeance
#
or whatever was done to them so truck drivers are often involved in these accidents so all these
#
things come together and yeah there's a host of stories i mean every other place in india will
#
have some particular spot which is haunted or which is known to be haunted where you should not try
#
after a particular time so that was widespread right from andhra to rajasthan at the same time
#
uh as far as highway robbery is concerned i mean many of them have faced these sorts of situations
#
you can't like drive a truck all your life and not be robbed essentially it's a huge part of
#
the highway economy uh there are some uh essentially i mean this is right since the
#
british era actually so many of the nomadic tribes who earlier used to essentially be
#
uh say wandering entertainers or all kinds of nomadic uh castes in india they were forced to
#
settle they were branded as criminal tribes and so on many of them took on to highway robbery as a
#
way of survival so this has been going on since a long time in india and uh truckers also have their
#
various uh they know what modus operandi highway robbers use some will slip in a field or some will
#
keep nails you know they are quite well versed in that of course there's nothing they can't do it
#
or do about it if that happens another interesting sort of observation i had about their internal
#
world is also linked to religion in the sense what there are various temples like one in rajasthan
#
which i visited where they because of the immense uncertainty that their job has you have to rely
#
at some level on the supernatural to lend some level of certainty so various deities across india
#
are known as the patron of truck drivers you will find so many trucks parked outside their temple
#
and at the same time they are the own gods i mean every uh every truck will have a huge set of
#
set of uh photos of hindu gods and say many truck drivers will also conduct rituals
#
in the sense as soon as it's dark they will you know light and other all of this is meant to
#
ensure their safety essentially because it is a immensely insecure job not just uh you know
#
losing your life there are thieves prowling all around in india if the moment you park your truck
#
you can assume if you leave it for like a day or so many things will be missing from there
#
there are petty criminality is rampant in all places in india so essentially this whole concept
#
of jugada it's like the same extension except you're like robbing someone using ingenious means
#
and so they have to constantly be on the watch out for these thieves so that is the sort of
#
things that preoccupy them uh in many ways the danger of losing your life and these stories they
#
come up with reflect many of these insecurities one of the fascinating stories i got from your
#
book was regarding these sahajdari seek truck drivers that you've taken a ride with and they
#
have a picture of a baba in the truck whose face is rather scarred and when they catch you looking
#
at the photograph they tell you the origin story which struck me as a fantastic origin story which
#
is that the baba looked normal but then one day this woman with a scarred face went to him and
#
said baba please help me no one will marry me because of my scarred face so he transferred
#
her scars onto himself which is just uh such a remarkable uh story you know you mentioned how
#
big a role religion plays in their lives for sort of obvious uh reasons as a source of hope and all
#
that and religion of course was famously you know once called the opium of the masses and actual
#
opium also plays a part in their lives like tell me a bit about the role of alcohol and drugs in
#
in the trucking life because uh you know one would imagine that when you live a life of such
#
solitude and loneliness on the road all the time not getting enough sleep and so on you know what
#
do you do for relief there's alcohol there's drugs you've described in your book about the
#
connection between alcohol and sex of course that sometimes when they uh you know prostitution
#
rackets will often run along the bushes where you know pimps will shine a light at night and
#
they'll know they have to stop there and sometimes they'll get robbed but sometimes they'll actually
#
be a sex worker there and the pimp will also have uh some uh taro with him in cape because they often
#
need alcohol to uh sort of get all their parts working as it were what's the role of that alcohol
#
and drug sort of play in the lives of these people so i'll take it one by one for start with alcohol
#
for instance uh i will i would say that uh its usage is uh exaggerated in the minds of our
#
the ordinary population with regard to our truck drivers the majority of the truck drivers i met
#
told me that they knew it puts their life at risk and that drinking and driving is dangerous so
#
there was that awareness throughout with one exception so i must have interacted with hundreds
#
of truckers and hitchhiked with around 30 to 50 of them and nowhere did i see any consumption while
#
on the road so that is an unfair stereotype which i would like to clarify for your listeners and
#
with regard to opium it is used in certain parts of the country like
#
uh panjab and rajasthan parts of haryana and it's interesting that india actually is one of the few
#
countries which is legally allowed to cultivate opium for medicinal purposes like all these
#
extracts like codeine which goes into cup syrups they are all derived from opium which is legally
#
cultivated in parts of rajasthan matyapadesh and up so it is from these areas that uh the bukkhi
#
that is poppy husk is sold uh which is actually legal in many parts of the country in rajasthan
#
for example you have government thekas which sell this and many truck drivers patronize these
#
thekas so in these parts there is uh quite a dependence on opium especially in panjab uh i mean
#
i asked anecdotally various truck drivers like what percentage of truck drivers we think take opium
#
and it was uh unanimously over around 75 percent so in panjab uh uh the sort of opium addiction we
#
see is quite high compared to the rest of the country uh one of the truckers i also traveled with
#
was a quite a heavy user of the bookie and he would rationalize it saying that i this bookie
#
makes me scratch myself and that is what give away trade of an opium addict which i found out right
#
now going around with them and that helps me stay awake and you know keep all these inhuman hours
#
so that was how he rationalized it they found kind of interesting uh but at the same time it
#
is extremely addictive uh the withdrawal symptoms are deadly the driver i met he himself had admitted
#
himself twice to a nasa mukti ke indra and he couldn't beat the habit in spite of his attempts
#
so it's really a dangerous sort of a drug which might seem its effects are quite mild
#
but the long-term effects on your body is very striking i mean the face becomes gaunt and uh
#
when your body sort of shrivels away and it's quite easy to make out someone who is dependent
#
on opium you know once you get an eye for that sort of thing yeah and it's interesting how sort
#
of i mean drugs of course are in the news these days and sitting in mumbai we shouldn't possibly
#
not comment too much upon them but it's interesting how a lot of things which could be considered
#
contraband or you know sort of in the narcotic family are actually normalized parts of our
#
cultures and that's fine like pang for example or you know in i'm half bengali so a vegetable i grew
#
up eating was posto aloo posto and posto is made with poppy seeds and uh you know so on and and uh
#
you know there are different levels of damage that uh they can do to both person i mean i i don't
#
think any bengali will say that posto ever did him any harm and if we speak of being addicted to
#
bengali food it's in an entirely uh harmless sort of sense uh in your book of course you pointed
#
out the gradations of this where some of it is just recreational and you use and it's cool and
#
it's not a big deal but some of the sort of the harder forms of the drug can you know really uh
#
damage people and how is it looked upon in the culture like is there a realization among truckers
#
that there is that line and uh you know those who cross it just can't help it i mean it's like
#
addiction i mean what do you do uh you go a little too far down that road and then you're sort of
#
stuck or you know are a lot of the milder forms like bhukki for example not treated as a drug
#
at all i mean it's just something that you have like panparag or whatever yes uh you're right
#
i mean i mean there is uh an acknowledgement of that line among many truck drivers for example
#
one of the truckers i traveled with his younger brother had died due to addiction to the harder
#
form which is called chitta in panjab so uh they very well know that these particular forms which
#
are often synthetic in nature and recent introductions to the landscape in bookies has
#
been taken since centuries in panjab and if farmhands used to use it i have used it throughout
#
historically as a way to keep up their spirits while toiling in the fields so there is definitely
#
that acceptance but yeah i mean often what happens is that the khalasis pick up these habits from
#
their ustads you know if and then once you are you're biologically addicted to it then it is
#
in spite of your best efforts it is very difficult to come up with to come out of that habit and
#
since your lifestyle also kind of encourages this the consumption i mean it's a monotonous job like
#
i said you need to break the monotony and this is a sort of crutch you come to rely upon to somehow
#
survive these grueling conditions and that's what happens with many truckers but yes there is that
#
line in their mind for sure so and you know an interesting observation you made in your book which
#
i keep making all the time so when i saw it in your book i'm like it was another come to my arms
#
rajat kind of moment which is when you speak about india inhabiting different centuries simultaneously
#
which you know i had always meant in a sense of social attitudes that we are in the 19th 20th
#
and 21st century especially if you see the way women are treated so there i would say we haven't
#
even hit the 21st it's mostly 19th and 20th except in some select twitter pockets but you know it
#
struck me that that line also that distinction also holds and i'm just thinking aloud as we're
#
speaking about the subject that it also holds in terms of what kind of substances you use in the
#
culture and what the science says for example there are many substances we use today for example
#
coffee in a manner of speaking you know it could be said that i'm addicted to coffee and coffee is
#
actually more addictive than many of the softer drugs that are actually banned and some some would
#
argue it's more harmful as well and also what i sometimes do though i haven't taken it today but
#
what i often take before recordings over i really need to focus is a cognitive drug called modafinil
#
india is one of the few places where it's actually legal over the counter so it's called
#
modular 100 not named after a prime minister and i find it's sort of remarkable i know a lot of
#
people who also take it though i would advise listeners not to try it just because i do but i
#
just find that it is you know while coffee is a blunt tool it's a sharp tool it just keeps me
#
really focused and mentally fresh even when i'm physically very tired the one should take it early
#
in the morning if you take it in the evening you're not going to sleep for the whole night
#
definitely so it's kind of interesting that on the one hand you have science going in one way where
#
we are getting revelations about the efficacy and the danger and the addictiveness of different drugs
#
and on the other hand you have laws which are kind of behind the science where you know maybe
#
there are a few decades behind the science and not really caught up with the science entirely
#
and then there is culture which is on its own long slow continuum where you know people have what they
#
have and and that's also completely sort of distant from all of these and as i'm thinking
#
aloud i'll ask you to join me in thinking aloud that even apart from this context can you sort of
#
you know what are the different kinds of things that come to your mind where you talk about
#
the different centuries that india inhabits not just sort of in this context but you know because
#
one could say that you actually took an effort to step out of your sort of elite educated middle
#
class bubble and sort of go around so you know any observations on this you know one constituency in
#
india which really comes to my mind when you talk about this are the nomadic tribes of india
#
they constitute around five to ten crores of our population but so many of them have not even been
#
they're not on electoral roles many of them don't have any identity documents so they are
#
essentially invisibilized citizens of our country i mean and because they are not even on the
#
electoral roles there is no sort of concerted effort to raise their standards of living or
#
some targeted schemes to for their welfare i mean there are but they are not as focused because they
#
do not form a core political constituency so many of these nomadic tribes they live
#
a lifestyle that is essentially unchanged from centuries essentially so for example i met the
#
gujjars and bakarwal while i was traveling in kashmir and their lifestyle i mean they
#
constitute what around 15 to 20 percent of kashmir's population altogether and they
#
they practice the right of trans humans which is essentially taking your flocks up the alpine
#
pastures and then during the summer and then in the winter you come down again so their entire
#
livelihood is derived from the wool and the dairy products and so on so this is just one example whom
#
i happened to encounter but across india in maharashtra for example you have the dhangars
#
india has such a huge livestock population right and who are the ones who are raising them many of
#
them belong to these nomadic tribes who are wandering across the landscape especially in
#
dekton you will find many of these tribes so i what what century are they really living in if you
#
really come to think of it i mean they will have the mobile phone of course i mean mobile phone has
#
become a proxy for modernity right in our minds that okay if someone has a mobile phone then
#
yeah he's in the modern world but i wonder if that is really a fair statement to make because
#
all other aspects of your life all the other comforts which we take for granted and even the
#
way you're living your life you're pitching tents in the middle of nowhere you are constantly moving
#
this is uh essentially unchanged uh for so many years so i mean this is one example that comes to
#
my mind when we say that india inhabits multiple centuries yeah and it's interesting you talk about
#
how you know when that the seasonal migration of the gujjars is happening and you're on your
#
way to kashmir at that time on that leg of the trip and they're all hitchhiking by the side of
#
the road trying to grab a lift and at that point it struck me that you know for these guys the
#
truck is almost like a time machine of sorts that otherwise they are sort of working with their
#
livestock but just for a moment they use the 20th century to get a little quicker and like you said
#
you know some of them if they have mobile phones they also have a slice of the 21st century in their
#
palms but it's just a gadget i mean you know what do you do with it i mean where does uh sort of uh
#
the the rest of the uh 21st century uh so to say comfort that's that's uh yeah that's a lot of food
#
for thought there and therefore we shall take a commercial break and think about it
#
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welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with rajat obhaikar author of the
#
delightful book truck day india and uh you know i have to say that uh for those who are listening
#
uh i had mentioned at the start of the show that we started an hour late because of technical
#
glitches where further technical glitches actually made us stop the recording and resume two days
#
later so right after the question about alcohol and drugs uh we had uh you know a problem which
#
made us sort of go offline and now you know three days later in fact uh the first half was recorded
#
on monday now we are back on thursday and we finished that answer taken a break and we are
#
here again and this is sort of the first time it's happening to me what i thought it's apt because
#
this is kind of both the life of truckers would be like uh which is the subject of uh rajat's book
#
interminable delays and so on and also rajat is joining the civil services so maybe this is
#
apt for that reason as well uh so you know one part of the book which sort of uh interest he
#
said silent but he's laughing by the way i can see on zoom uh so one part of the book which really
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uh uh sort of interested me uh rajat was also about where you talk about how over time like
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we've already spoken about how they sort of have a distinctive culture of their own how they develop
#
anthologies of their own and part of the book which i really enjoyed was about how they own
#
develop their own vocabulary with their own aphorisms and sayings and all that for example
#
one example of that which you give of course is majboori ka naam mahatma gandhi hai and then
#
within the book there were these sort of delightful little throwaway lines like i'll read out a couple
#
of them which i really like there's one which cautions the drivers to drive carefully and the
#
line is and then there's another one which seems sort of almost a sad acceptance of their lot
#
where they say quote and these are you know both that they are humorous they're reflective
#
uh they're even self-deprecatory uh you must be familiar with a lot of uh you know this uh stuff
#
there what was your sense of sort of navigating the lingo and what kind of sense did it give you
#
again to go back to the subject we discussed earlier of their interior lives like do some of
#
these become cliches or tropes that come up again and again and you know and is it often in terms
#
of language and this is a broader reflection than just beyond the trucking life that sometimes can
#
such lingo and such vocabulary and can such tropes offer sort of the comfort of familiarity to
#
people who you know might crave that so uh i mean uh these uh sort of aphorisms they came up uh
#
quite again and again through my journey and many of these are passed down from ustar to khalas
#
i mean it's part of the initiation into the world of trucking and into the world of the highway
#
because the highway is for them is this unknown beast right which they have to constantly negotiate
#
it keeps throwing up these challenges for them which they have to overcome time and again uh so
#
these aphorisms also serve as sort of a tutorial in some ways to uh about how to navigate the highway
#
at the same time it is uh also a way to look at their own lives or which are not the lifestyle
#
is extremely grueling so uh they seek consolation in these uh aphorisms i mean of course in the
#
south there must be different versions of these which i could not really appreciate uh but uh in
#
rajasthan and punjab these aphorisms i have uh developed over the years and the young khalasis
#
are especially fond of recounting them uh when you ask them uh so that is how i learned about them
#
from from the khalasis mainly the ustars generally are a bit of know-it-alls they they are the ones
#
who are a bit more reserved usually the khalasis love to talk and they're young chaps i mean they
#
are hardly 20-21 and they're quite open about their whatever they've learned so far and is
#
there a sort of a difference between the way the khalasis and the ustars approach you and also is
#
there a difference in the way that they approach life like we spoke before the break about how
#
you know the ustars there is almost a sense of poignancy because the status of the truck driver
#
has become more lowly over the course of their careers and there would also be the sense of
#
hopelessness where they realize that it's a dead-end street are the khalasis also like that or are
#
the khalasis more sort of ambitious and looking beyond trucking and so on what was your experience
#
of that yeah the ustars tend to be more jaded they are more jaded about life the best part of
#
their lives is behind them and there's nothing as such they have to look forward to except driving
#
the truck or the khalasis they are just taking in the side you know they're traveling across india
#
they're learning new stuff for couple of years they're just traveling so they are on a learning
#
curve if you could put it that way so they are more hopeful and their worldview is also much
#
wider for example one khalasi i met in naga land he used to listen to rihanna justin bieber and all
#
these folks he was quite influenced by american culture also you can see that difference i mean
#
this guy will probably some a couple of years down the line he'll probably take up something else
#
because he has access to the english language to some degree his worldview is much much wider
#
than that of the ustars so i did see that difference yeah it's interesting his worldview
#
would be wider than his ustad who is driving a truck but at the same time his worldview would be
#
wider than wherever he's coming from because he's traveled all around so in a sense he's
#
transcending both of those contexts of his another interesting thing that you pointed out in the book
#
and which didn't actually take me by surprise at all is the enormous warmth and generosity
#
with which you were treated like you've spoken about how at different times they would not
#
allow you to pay for anything in one case after you started the journey they actually drove into
#
this dhaba which you immediately knew was much more upscale than they would otherwise go to
#
and they ordered a lavish meal with two paneer dishes and a lot of tandoori roti and all that
#
and they insisted on paying for it and said even though they are spending many times a day's
#
normal allowance for food on that and how did you know where do you think that comes from because
#
you know there is this i often feel that we in the middle class and and we elites are sort of
#
you know much less generous and much less open in that sense than the people you know the middle
#
class will refer to as a great unwashed as you put it earlier in your episode i don't mean to imply
#
that either you or i listen to refer to them like that like i remember when i first went to Pakistan
#
to cover the cricket tour in 2006 and i was covering the tour for the guardian and cricket
#
for and the first time we were in Lahore we needed to buy some pencil cells for our recorders and all
#
that and two or three of us went to a store and we bought a whole bunch of supplies and then we
#
asked for the bill and we were chit chatting and at one point we mentioned we are from India we've
#
come to cover the tour everything changes you know until then it's all transactional and
#
you know whatever the moment we say they are from India just a warmth just overflows and they refuse
#
to take money and i know that's a cliche that they refuse to sort of take money from you but we
#
experience this like with one minor exception of a small incident somewhere we sort of experience
#
this everywhere we went you know the the generosity of the common person to what someone he does not
#
need to be generous to someone who is probably you know much better off than him and and as you said
#
you experience is this Mehman Nawazi of the trucker towards someone who's you know much better off
#
who's come from another world and is going to go back to that world soon what did you make of that
#
was it as ubiquitous as you know the sense that i got from the book and how did it kind of make
#
you feel and did you then get conscious about not exploiting it about you know taking a step back
#
and sort of not you know all of that Amit yeah about the middle class the attitudes are definitely
#
different in terms of how you look at money how you look at strangers so what i saw among many
#
truckers the attitude was that the money keeps coming and going and they often refer to themselves
#
also as dildar as someone who is not tight-fisted in any way so that is the sort of mythology that
#
they have some of them have constructed around their lifestyle and that sort of generosity i
#
think is tied up with that particular self-conception among the middle class i would say yeah there is
#
relatively less openness and generosity in my experience and if it is generosity it is often
#
in the mold of charity i mean so there's a conscious tendency to look at generosity
#
as charity as something that accrues merit and there is a certain selfish intent behind it also
#
in terms of you will get something in the next life or you will be reborn or whatever these
#
particular concerns are there among them but unselfconscious a pure generosity as the kind i
#
found was something i do not expect to find among the middle class as far as how it made me feel
#
yeah it made me extremely conscious many times i refused also i mean you have to step your foot
#
down and when such things happen which happened all the time in the south i felt things were a
#
bit more transactional in terms of the attitudes of the truckers also because that whole self-conception
#
of the lifestyle i mean what i saw was that in the south it is more of a livelihood rather than a
#
lifestyle so in the north it's they actually consider it as this is my style and this is how
#
we do things the south the truck is more of a asset which is meant to be monetized and so for
#
example one trucker i met he was he used to take on hitchhikers like anything like there were 10
#
people sitting in the same truck by the end of the journey in the truck cabin or couple of them with
#
their backs to the windshield there were rice sacks and the entire truck was full also that is
#
how he owns an extra buck i mean i admire his entrepreneur i mean though it might be
#
illegal to fill people in like that but he is trying to make some money out of it
#
and because how much does his job really make in terms of salaries so that spirit i admired in the
#
north i didn't find this hitchhiking seemed to be too much except in up up was insane i mean i
#
didn't write about it in the book but i hitchhiked from delhi to kanpur and i was standing by the
#
side of the road with my bag and i was just holding my finger out and i see in five minutes
#
there are around six or seven people around me like this they've seen that okay this guy apparently
#
he knows how to find uh uh whatever vehicle they didn't even know i was going in a truck
#
and finally when the truck stopped uh i see that there are already two three people inside
#
and all these six seven people with me are also getting it so the sort of overpopulation there is
#
in up uh means that not just buses and trains even trucks are overcrowded i mean there was not a
#
single truck which i got in which was not already filled with people uh so that was quite insane
#
nowhere else did i uh find that happening so that was quite interesting yeah and it's also
#
also sort of interesting i mean i'm just wondering now you spoke about how truck drivers see
#
themselves as dildar and and and to some extent i'm wondering if that also comes from the self
#
image that they build around themselves that someone in the south will build a different kind
#
of self-image where it's a livelihood and he's doing it for that reason and that's you know and
#
and whereas someone in the north like you said will consider it part of their lifestyle or who
#
they are and especially the way the punjabi sees himself as being dildar and being uh so you know
#
exquisite mehman nawazi and all of that you know there's also a section where you speak about
#
seeks in uh trucking where uh you write quote interestingly in north america as in india the
#
seeks have become a dominant presence in trucking i wonder if the long twist with migration has
#
something to do with why punjabis took to driving trucks with such enthusiasm because what is
#
trucking what a form of constant displacement uh stop quote and that gives a sense that for many
#
punjabis you know just trucking and getting on there is a much more natural than it is for
#
people perhaps elsewhere because so many of them do it and then that just creates a cycle whether
#
it's a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle one really can't comment it depends on their circumstances
#
trucking might be the best thing they have available to them so it might even be a virtuous cycle
#
and apart from that just the sort of the lifestyle connotations or the sort of all of that the other
#
sort of part of your book which i found quite fascinating was the relationship between the
#
trucker and the truck like which is very different from the relationship between anyone else who
#
drives the vehicle and uh his vehicle you know like i would not feel for my car the way uh all
#
truckers would feel about their trucks and you spent a bunch of time in this place called sirhin
#
would they actually you know uh build trucks tell me a little bit about what is that relationship
#
between the trucker and the truck so i'll just speak about the punjabis a bit before i get to
#
your question so there the history of punjab is quite tied up with that of trucking in india
#
so after partition many Sikhs and khatris from west pakistan who were resettled in these refugee
#
colonies many of them spread out from there and they started driving trucks that and this was
#
also tied up with the world war two which had just ended and many military issue trucks had ended up
#
in india at that time and these were then refashioned by their new owners and personalized
#
in some ways and that is the close linkage and often what happens is that wherever punjabis go
#
driving trucks some entrepreneurial chap will set up a punjabi dhaba also this is also the reason
#
why punjabi food has become the sort of pan indian food and when we say indian food it's often
#
punjabi mughalais that sort of thing and there is a link with close link with trucking over there
#
why we see that and as far as your question goes this whole personalization you know is linked to
#
the emergence of centers like sirhindi because so firstly i like speak a little about why indian
#
trucks and trucks in the subcontinent are so colorful you know what is the or like why is
#
this so specific to the subcontinent so it is linked to the history of goods transport in india
#
across history there have been certain communities like the banjaras and so on who were tasked with
#
transporting goods and their tradition was to decorate their animals so the camels their hairs
#
would hair would be braided the bullock carts would be decorated the bullocks themselves will
#
would have like tassels hanging around their ears and these are the same tassels which we see
#
the hanging around trucks also and we also even see so one text i read dating back to the
#
back to the 10th or 12th century about how a ship was decorated or during that time we don't find
#
too many references to these sort of things but i found one and all the motifs right from the peacocks
#
to the eagles i mean everything was repeated i mean so many of these things you can find in
#
a 10th 12th century text on how to paint a ship and all these motives are recurring in truck art
#
today so i found that incredibly fascinating i mean this is not just some modern phenomenon
#
though its history has not been adequately documented and it's not possible to document
#
it as much because of its informal nature but it has a long history in pakistan for example
#
there has been a bit more documentation of truck art because there truck art is much more intricate
#
and it's much more colorful it's insane i mean you must have seen when you went to pakistan but
#
so there we see some historical accounts of how when the artisans of princely states in
#
rajasthan and gujarat many of them muslims migrated to karachi after partition and there they started
#
they transferred their skills to trucking and that's how these sort of motifs came up in pakistan
#
in india unfortunately we don't have as much record but sirhind it was definitely a fascinating
#
place to be in and what that showed me was how much care a trucker puts into decorating his
#
vehicle and like you said like the proprietor of that particular establishment told me it's like
#
choosing a life partner so a lot of thought needs to be put into how you want the cabin
#
so you are because you're going to spend like eight out of 12 months of your life there probably
#
more so it is much more it's like your home and you there should not be any compromises on that end
#
so the punjabi and the kashmiri truckers especially the kashmiri truckers would invest a lot
#
i mean when i visited it was around two lakhs in just decorating their truck which is a lot
#
so yes this says a lot about the relationship between a truck and a trucker so often they
#
refer to the truck itself as a she or as a demure woman or a bride so it's like
#
all these references come up where there is the personification of the truck it's given some
#
human qualities and ultimately it does pay off i mean investing a loss this amount of money and
#
time so they stay for one month in that establishment until the whole truck is made all the design is done
#
one month they just wait there supervise the building of the truck that is the amount of
#
devotion and care they put and i don't think you will find that anywhere else in
#
the world apart from the indian subcontinent one of the tils in your book and it changed the way i
#
will look at trucks forever is that when a manufacturer sells a truck to a trucker he's
#
basically selling the chassis right and and the rest of it the body of the truck is something
#
that is built and customized and like you pointed out there are some places like south india i think
#
you pointed out where it's very functional and they don't really care so much but up north the
#
kashmiris and the punjabis and different cultures will they'll have the truck done up just the way
#
they want like you quoted me was saying who runs red establishment and syrin they're saying that
#
this is like sort of buying a home and like choosing a life partner but also like buying a home
#
where you want every aspect of it sort of personalized and customized exactly as you
#
want all the way down to hidden compartments so what what do they do with hidden compartments
#
so hidden compartments are often used to hide contraband like for example one chap i traveled
#
with we used to hide his bookie in there whatever for his personal consumption i'm sure the there's
#
a lot of smuggling also that happens in india it definitely happens and a lot of this is facilitated
#
through these hidden compartments and so on because they are useful right i mean when the
#
state is often out there to take money from you on various pretexts if there's anything you need
#
to hide which is very likely you will have these hidden compartments come in handy but i'll also
#
like talk a bit about the whole the process i didn't get into it the process of building the
#
truck itself so from the chassis there are around say 10 to 15 different types of artisans who are
#
at work trying to sort of build a skeletal framework first around the chassis and then
#
you will have the radium tape the electrician the painter the cabin maker the welder the artisan
#
will cut the chador and in all these geometrical shapes so it's a very very specialized job
#
uh and often in panjab for example i saw that literally all of these artisans were from bihar
#
and in sirin the place i visited all of them were from one district which is madhubani district
#
in bihar which itself has a rich heritage of uh you know folk art in the madhubani paintings
#
are quite famous so this uh it's the traditional skill in that region and many of them come to
#
come to panjab uh to uh to work in these uh establishments and i stayed there for a couple
#
of days and it was a revelation i mean it was a lot of fun just talking to these chaps talking
#
to truck artist trying to see how he how he has learned these things and there also we find that
#
whole ustad khala saying it's like much of india actually runs on these informal apprenticeship
#
uh networks informal training because the it's not very well established uh everything that
#
most indians have learned it has been from some uh generous person either a relative or
#
someone you know who will very generously impart his skills so that you can pick it up and uh
#
that was quite interesting and i was also you know struck by a part of your book where you talk about
#
how you know the roads of india itself are changing like there is an ecosystem out there and uh you
#
know there are all these different moving subcultures as it were traveling through these
#
roads but then at one point while traveling through gujarat you made the observation quote
#
the highways in gujarat are so slick they've attained the soulless efficiency of the autobahns
#
and freeways of the west stop code and elsewhere you know you have spoken about how at different
#
parts of the road you have different dhabas catering to different kinds of clientele like
#
fall punjabis and so on but at the same time you talk about how some of these flyovers and so on
#
are just sort of passing them by for example at one point uh when you stopped at a dhaba you say
#
quote business for many of these dhabas especially in gujarat has been slow earlier they occupied
#
prime real estate right by the highway but the spree of flyover construction has bypassed many
#
of them now cars and trucks just zoom above them oblivious to their presence stop code so is there
#
sort of and i know that there are always these trade-offs and we can both bemoan the loss of the
#
richness of this cultural diversity in the form of the different types of dhabas and on the other
#
hand there is a increased efficiency the quicker travel times which also add so to say unseen
#
elements to the lives of the truckers and the drivers what sense did you get of this from the
#
truckers themselves like is this loss something that they bemoaned did you feel that there is
#
some color being lost here which is uh you know which we don't appreciate enough and
#
you know what were your thoughts i would say the effect has largely been positive many truckers
#
are happy and they can they're very conscious they can see the fact that roads have improved
#
so much over the last 10-15 years especially the national highways so as one trucker put it to me
#
he says that it's become very easy for us most of the cities we can there's a bypass which they've
#
made from which we can can avoid the city itself and almost all of the villages have flyovers so
#
our job is just to drive and there are not too many hurdles in our way and that enables them to
#
do more business because the turnaround time reduces it improves their income overall and generally
#
it's a good thing i would say of course there is a lot of resistance to these things you know
#
interestingly when i i visited my native village while on this trip in the middle on the karnataka
#
coast and what i found there was there are protests happening by the locals because they
#
are building a flyover which will bypass their main market by the highway so by the highway they
#
have like all these shops and stuff but the government is trying to build a flyover which
#
will bypass and there is ferocious resistance to this and you will not allow this flyover to be
#
built so you see the kind of challenges the government also has to overcome to bring this
#
so-called development and this loss of heritage etc that's when all this comes up right then all
#
these traditional establishments have been there for decades find themselves suddenly bypassed so
#
that aspect is there but i will say it's largely been problem great let's kind of move on to i
#
mean we spoken a lot about panjab and kashmir and all of that let's let's i found a section on the
#
northeast interesting because interesting for reasons that it told me about a lot more than
#
just the trucking life it also gave me a sense of how the northeast is almost such a unique part of
#
india if we can call it a part of india at all like you know to sort of go back to my trip of
#
pakistan my impression through traveling through lahore karachi islamabad all these places were
#
that it was just like india the signs were in urdu but culturally i never felt away from home
#
and the one place where i did feel away from home was when i went to peshawar and the
#
that frontier you know and traveled down the kyber pass and there you know everybody looks
#
different and they're speaking sort of a different language pashto instead of urdu and there you know
#
the sense was kind of different not unfriendly not in that sense not hostile but just different
#
and i thought that you know that similar difference and it's very interesting so i'll
#
since this is a show that welcomes digression i'll take one of my own that you know one of the
#
enterprising journalists i was traveling with he managed to do some jugar and he got these guys who
#
would take us right to the edge of the kyber pass where the border with afghanistan is so we could
#
look down on afghanistan and that's an area where the army doesn't even allow pakistanese to go
#
right it's uh it's just a restricted area sort of so to say and we had a couple of army guys in
#
plain clothes accompanying us and we got in a jeep and there were four five of our journalists
#
and it was this nice trip and we went right to the edge where we are you know standing there and
#
looking down into afghanistan it was quite awesome and we were told that if anywhere you are stopped
#
by one of these whatever whatever you do don't say you're from india which is kind of obvious
#
right so at one point these guys stopped us and this dude with this big gun and by the way guns
#
are ubiquitous we went to the gun market in pishawar where you can just you know just buy a
#
gun like you're buying oranges uh and anyway so this this army dude with a big gun who stopped
#
us he just looks me in the face from like seven inches away and says and i said sir
#
and he said as if pakistan is another country right as if you know india
#
is not the problem pakistan is a foreign country to those guys and i of course heard of that as
#
you know many kashmiris must be looking at india that way but apart from that i got a sense of
#
i've always you know had a sense of the northeast a little bit like that and i was really struck by
#
this lovely phrase you use where you talk about going from india to almost india you know and i
#
thought that's such a lovely phrase tell me a little bit about your experience of northeast
#
india like what did you expect and what did you find and what were your impressions and you know
#
is it comparable to you know what i just sort of spoke about in my indulgent digression northeast
#
india was possibly the biggest unknown in this entire trip for me as well because i didn't know
#
anyone over there not a single thing except for meghalaya where i had friends but in nadaland
#
and manipur i didn't know anyone so i was quite nervous actually and the sort of reputation that
#
particular highway enjoys nx39 so there one out of six days the highway is banned because of these
#
strikes which are called by various insurgent groups and my journey itself began on a not a
#
very positive note because when i visited dimapur like i started off from dimapur in nagaland which
#
is in the plains and pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of india so there i found out that
#
some insurgent group has called a ban and the highway shut down for two days and you can't go
#
anywhere you're stuck there so that's the note on which the journey itself began and going forward
#
i was hoping it would be a bit more safer and it was because i encountered these three chaps who were
#
absolutely amazing amar abbar anthony they called themselves but their real names were rahul michael
#
and muhammad and it's almost like my brother when he read these that particular
#
uh chapter he asked me dude are you sure you're not making this up i was like no not at all because
#
uh i myself was so taken aback by uh this thing i mean you have a hindu muslim christian in one
#
truck and the interesting thing here there is not just the difference in religion it's actually the
#
difference in ethnicity like as i write in the book all these uh three people uh spoke languages
#
that belong to different language families all together i mean in one truck i mean where would
#
you find that sort of thing in the world let alone india uh one of them was a munda adivasi from
#
jharkhand originally who had uh come to assam generations ago as a tea worker so he essentially
#
spoke munda at home which is an austro asiatic language another chap spoke bordo which is a
#
tibetan birthman language and one of them was a bengali muslim so he spoke an indo-aryan language
#
so these uh fault lines are so many in the northeast in india we just think of caste but
#
there is a religion there's its tribe and even among the hindus there's caste so uh quite an
#
incredible place to be in but the sense that you got about pakistan in beshawar i would say i
#
definitely got it people would repeatedly ask me if i was from india uh and that was that question
#
often was often came from a place of curiosity and slight suspicion also because of the history of
#
the relationship between india and those parts in the aspa for instance is still
#
implemented over there so that was there but it was a totally different place i mean
#
it reminded me more of the southeast asia that i had seen in the lonely planet documentaries and
#
and so on and not as much of india and ultimately i kind of fled from manipur eventually as i write
#
in the book because i have been on the road for four months and then there were gunshots outside
#
my hotel in the dead of the night which i still don't know what exactly happened but it sort of
#
unnerved me and you realize that you are in an environment that is so radically different from
#
mainland india in so many ways that uh there is no there is a tremendous sense of insecurity
#
especially in imphal uh koima i quite liked koima was great there's so many amazing bookshops
#
and the place in general is quite vibrant i mean apart from the fact that everything shuts down
#
at 6 30 and only the restaurants stay open till 8 30 apart from that the place was quite young and
#
i didn't feel out of the place over there but imphal definitely gave me the creeps as a place
#
and ultimately i decided to go back from there but the experience was an eye-opener throughout
#
right from asam to manipur and i would recommend listeners to visit sometime just to see what
#
amazing landscapes and just the kind of linguistic ethnic diversity india has
#
it'll blow your mind for sure you know i was struck by you know how you've written about
#
the massive korean influence in uh uh imphal in manipur and also you know speaking of linguistic
#
diversity i was also fascinated by this new language which you described to me like of course
#
like like you pointed out there are all these different language families austroasiatic and
#
tibetan burmese and indo-aryan which are kind of mingling together and you spoke about this new
#
language which has kind of come out at the interest evolved at the intersection of all of
#
these called nagamis tell me a little bit about that so nagamis uh i found like because of this
#
tremendous diversity you have to arrive at a common language in which you can converse like
#
the lingua franca and in dimapur and some other parts of nagaland nagamis is that standard
#
language it's a mix of naga words asamese bengali hindi it's like oh it's not an entirely formed
#
language it's a creole language it's not a fully developed language so to speak but people do
#
uh get by with that and its history is dated dates back to centuries apparently the nagas evolved
#
this because the asamese revenue collectors merchants they would frequently come up to the
#
hills to extract tribute or whatever so this sort of language evolved to to enable communication
#
between the nagas and the asamese now of course it has the scope of the language itself has expanded
#
it has also taken in hindi words because of the tremendous bihari migration in dimapur and even
#
in the northeast everywhere so a lot of biharis who are i mean almost all the vegetable vendors
#
i saw in koima were from bihar or the people who are selling frogs and silk worms in dimapur were
#
from jharkhand it's insane the amount of migration that happens in india and all the interesting
#
encounters this leads to and of course all the linguistic developments it ultimately leads to
#
and naga means is the best example yeah yeah i was also kind of struck by your description of how
#
they sometimes call themselves west southeast asia if i remember correctly yeah so one insurgent
#
group has uh branded itself as you know the group of not northeast india but west southeast asia
#
which is an extremely convoluted way if you add the north over there then you have you'll have
#
all the cardinal directions in that name so yeah i was also kind of struck by uh sort of the
#
political economy of what's happening in terms of uh the struggles like you of course spoke about
#
uh you know the uh the sort of insurgents and the battles that they're in and i'll kind of take
#
another uh digression because when i was i had written an essay a long time back about the maoist
#
insurgencies uh in um you know the east of india and i'd also use the same concept while talking
#
about uh the gangsters of up but it's essentially a concept which was formulated by this economist
#
called manker alson and uh it's a concept of roving bandits and stationary bandits and the
#
way alson talks about it is that imagine you're a village and you're just living and you know
#
there's no one ruling over you and you're just living life but every once in a while bandits
#
will come and they'll wipe you out and they'll go away and now there are two kinds of bandits so
#
one kind of bandit is a roving bandit which is a bandit who is passing by and therefore
#
the incentives of those roving bandits are just to take everything they can and destroy the place
#
and leave it completely barren and then there are the stationary bandits and they are the roving
#
bandits who come there and then they decide that let us just stay here and milk this place there's
#
no need to destroy it and they basically become the state so the state is a stationary bandit
#
but their incentives are different they don't want to destroy these people they just want to
#
keep them at the level where they can continue taking uh uh sort of tributes from these people
#
and continue taking hafta or taxes or whatever you call it they are the state and it seems to
#
me that a lot of uh sort of low level conflict that is happening in india is a conflict between
#
a state that hasn't quite managed to establish the rule of law and become the stationary bandit
#
which gives it the monopoly on violence and these other people who are on one hand they
#
are roving bandits and sometimes they themselves try to play the role of stationary bandits like
#
in parts of the red corridor where you know the insurgents will also try to provide some of those
#
sort of services would that sort of framework fit what you saw in the northeast because like
#
at one point there is a striking quote by you where you say quote there is no real difference
#
between the policeman and the insurgents it's a kind of situation where in the same house one
#
brother will be a policeman and the other and he says only half joking you're quoting someone here
#
and they work together in a climate of conimans he says but with no humor this time uh so what was
#
your sense of the dynamics of that kind of situation while you were there especially as
#
you were kind of worried about your own safety in that regard so your description fits in perfect
#
with what's happening over there because they essentially run a parallel government and it is
#
well established it's an open secret that government employees themselves pay part of their
#
salaries to the insurgent groups and all the businessmen have to pay something if you want
#
to run any kind of business you have to pay something to the nsc and im which is the leading
#
insurgent group in nagaland recently there was quite a bit of a controversy after the governor
#
of nagaland rn rabi he called out all these insurgent groups called them armed not rebels
#
armed criminals armed groups which they did not take uh well too so uh there was even controversy
#
after uh he said that all government employees should disclose uh which of their relatives are
#
in these insurgent groups and that led to a lot of discontent among the the government employees
#
over there so that situation still exists and it has existed over the years because
#
the insurgents over there are not really insurgents so to say they have a proper camp
#
what are very few kilometers away from bingapur where they have their own military setup and
#
uh since uh around couple of decades they uh have a ceasefire with the indian state which has
#
essentially allowed them all these privileges of collecting of taxes from the truckers truckers
#
especially have to bear the brunt of this there's also a lot of highway robbery on ns39 so they are
#
constantly put at risk because of this and it's bewildering you know when you go there you can't
#
figure out which is the state and which which are the insurgents you can never really tell uh
#
because the policemen sometimes of course will wear the uniform but otherwise so many of the
#
people who are collecting all these entry tax etc they'll have nothing on they look damn shady
#
they look like dangerous people by the just by the looks on their faces and you can never really
#
tell which insurgent group this guy belongs to there's this uh it's like the fog of war right
#
that's the sort of uh situation you find yourself in and that can be very unsettling i mean that was
#
part of the reason why i constantly felt a bit insecure over there because you don't know who
#
the authority is and who the threat is and it also strikes i should also possibly clarify on
#
your behalf that when you say the people collecting entry taxes had nothing on what you mean is they
#
had no uniform on i am sure that they had something on apart from that you know i when i was reading
#
the section of your book and the northeast i was actually selfishly hoping that uh you know you
#
would stay there longer and you know take one for the team stay there for a couple of years and write
#
a bit more because that was just such a fascinating section now another sort of fascinating aspect of
#
the book which i really enjoyed and coming back now to india in uh general is your sort of detailed
#
breakdown of the trucking economy uh you know where you talk about where you sort of talk about
#
we've already spoken about you know satayasvijat and you know chatasvijat but you've broken down
#
the trucking sort of economy into you know it's different constituent parts like there is a
#
consigner and then there is the operator and in between them there is a booking agent and there
#
is a commission agent and a lot of the trucking economies of consists of really small players
#
like 75 percent of it is you know people who own less than five trucks and uh you know so on you've
#
spoken about the information asymmetry the cartels corruption and all of that all you know again could
#
be a whole book about the political economy of that and it's so fascinating tell me a little
#
bit about that what was the journey of discovery through these structures that sort of exist and
#
within the trucking industry in india first thing that really struck me was the level of cartelization
#
that is there in the industry it's quite insane i mean a very small proportion of the booking agents
#
who are essentially the guys who are the middlemen for the consignors the guy who wants to send his
#
mall these guys essentially control the prices and there is no transparency in how this price is
#
fixed because it's all over the phone it's extremely opaque and the way these deals are structured is
#
that the share of the proceeds which goes to the trucker is negligible compared to the effort and
#
the risk that he is putting in in this whole enterprise i mean he's the one who's putting his
#
life at risk right essentially by going on the road all year and of course he's the one who's
#
doing the grunt work but around 40 to 50 percent of the entire amount that the consigner pays goes to
#
the middleman so as one trucker put it to move india and that really struck me because
#
across the landscape i mean i don't know if there is any estimate on what proportion of india earns
#
its living just by being a middleman i mean i'm sure it's going to be huge right from the agricultural
#
markets where we see the dominance of the arhatiyas to the sort of fixers that exist
#
even outside government government offices who can get your files passed i mean these are all
#
middlemen right who are somehow earning a living by doing as little as possible and getting as
#
much as possible in return and this is the trucking industry is also no stranger to this in fact i
#
would say it's one of the industries which is highly dominated by intermediaries so that was
#
quite a revelation how i found all this was by going to these transport nuggers which are
#
ubiquitous they are there in almost every small and big city you will have one transport nugga
#
where all the trucks will go they will the offices of all the middlemen will be over there who will
#
connect the supplier to the trucker and these places are quite great i mean you can just go to
#
any office sit the guy will offer you some chai some a couple of more cups and you can just sit
#
there and chat they don't have much on their hands they'll have their phone falls in between
#
but they're happy to chat usually so i spent quite a lot of time in these transport numbers
#
across india every place i went to i would spend one day in the transport number just try to talk
#
to people and just figure out how things work there so that was quite interesting and the
#
corruption in the industry it accounts for around 50 000 crore a year so the latest estimate says
#
that around 50 000 crores rupees is paid in bribes by truckers it is staggering it's five trillion
#
rupees in just one year and that was quite insane and these arrangements are highly organized you
#
know that was another striking thing like the truckers in udaipur pointed out to me they are
#
they are actually given these coded receipts like there will be something written on it qss
#
just to clarify to the guy who's going to extract money ahead that you have already paid it and
#
it's stunning how organized it is i mean and the truckers of course bear the brunt of this every
#
person who stops them extract some money from them and you know the survey said that around
#
uh 40 percent of them give no reason at all and the interesting thing is that around 30 percent of
#
them uh take money in the name of mata ka jagran that some of these local groups will say that okay
#
we have this mata ka jagran here happening so then this is not even the state okay these are just
#
random people and who may be linked to the political class in some way but it's not
#
it's not government officials who so this is another thing which was quite striking because
#
there is no difference as such between the state and these sort of shadowy figures who are linked
#
to the local political economy in many ways in goa for instance once i've told me that
#
all the money that is extracted from them goa is like a lot of mining happens there
#
you actually used to happen and trucks have a terrible time in goa like drivers i mean our
#
experiences of course is that of an idyllic vacations but for truckers goa is just a terrible
#
place and he says the majority of the people who collect this money are just agents of some local
#
politician there is a blurring between the state and will you realize what the level of rule of law
#
is that exists in reality on indian highways and throughout the recurring pattern was of this only
#
the complete breakdown of rule and law in many ways sometimes by the state itself and sometimes
#
by these extra legal authorities no and that's that's so fascinating to me like the state as
#
the supposed stationary bandit but not managing to be the stationary bandit efficiently enough so
#
all of these little other sort of roving bandits becoming stationary there for a while i'll come
#
back to the corruption angle of it because that's so fascinating but first you know to go back to
#
the way the the trucking economy is structured so tell me if i got that right there is a consigner
#
who has to send goods somewhere and there is a trucker who is actually taking the goods somewhere
#
and in between there are two kinds of agents one is a booking agent who is dealing with the consigner
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and saying okay this is the kind of money i'll take from you to get the job done and below that
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is the commission agent who is a guy who the booking agent contacts and who is then passing
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the job on to the trucker himself now over here what is happening is as you pointed out there is
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a symmetry of information nobody knows what the guy above him in the food chain is really charging
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and this is a huge problem so give me a sense of supposing if you have any idea of a broad
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mota mota idea of these kind of figures that supposing i am a consigner and i am paying 100
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rupees to get my goods taken from x to y how much of that 100 is going to the trucker i would say
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around 60 of that will go to the trucker yeah 50 to 60 will go to that trucker the intermediaries
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take around 40 to 50 percent of whatever the money is the booking agents will take more than
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the commission that's really interesting because then i'd imagine that if someone manages to disrupt
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the market and clean up some of the friction in between then the consigner can pay 90 instead of
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100 and the trucker can take 70 instead of 60 and you can still have enough left over for the
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middleman but i guess that the middlemen themselves are a kind of mafia and they control access and
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it would be very difficult to break into that kind of market right yeah in many ways you know
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so you know so i'm talk to some startup folks also you know who are trying to break this
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stranglehold of the intermediaries and so in theoretically it's so easy right to make one
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nice portal where you connect the consigner to the trucking agent himself and you just eliminate the
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middleman it's theoretically it sounds so simple but like you said the middlemen are like a proper
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mafia so the offices of these guys they were working in vishakapatnam at that time their
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offices were attacked broken into they're pretty much trashed by the gundas of these middlemen
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who realized that these guys are gaining some traction in the area and cutting our business
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so they are quite a powerful segment in this industry and it all works on the phone right
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that sort of tech adoption and penetration of technology in this industry is especially low
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compared to many others and given india's terrible networks i mean when you go to the highway in the
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city itself often it's bad when you go to the highways so no question so all that makes it
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very difficult to sort of address this stranglehold of the intermediaries and most of the startups that
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are in this space this holistic space and in the business of removing the intermediaries have most
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of them have given up there are a couple of them but largely most of them have shut shop
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so that that tells a lot about how much control and influence the intermediaries
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that's that's fascinating i was also you know struck by at different parts of your book
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there is the intermingling of sort of history with your narrative and at one point you talk about how
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shersa suri did so many things to eliminate the highway robbery problem because even though you
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don't have trucks in that time you do have goods being transported and you do have the problem of
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highway robbers and i'll ask you a bit to elaborate upon that and elaborate on you know then the irony
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that in modern times as you say in your book i'll read out again from what you've written where you
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write quote if we were to compare medieval and modern india it would seem things have both changed
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and remained the same while the highways today are relatively safer and punishments less drastic
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official extraction from truckers highway robbery by another name continues unabated perpetrated with
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the aid of extractive innovations such as mechanical stop code and mechanical is within single quotes
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it's obviously a particular kind of find that you describe which was very opaque and then you got
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to the bottom of it and you found that it was for flouting rules which are itself written so vaguely
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that they're open to interpretation and therefore it is sort of highway robbery and as you pointed
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out there is highway robbery by the state and by others so it seems that there is a culture of
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highway robbery which has come all the way from shesha suri and all that and that's also a kind
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of a fascinating period so tell me about sort of the the historical development of the culture of
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our road so to say the two main highways of india historically uttarapatha and the dakshinapatha
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so these two were the historical main highways one uttarapatha linked peshawar to bengal and
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the dakshinapatha linked bihar the patliputra through madhya padees etc to the west coast
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and to maharashtra so and from there there were other routes which went across south india so
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these were the two main routes and what we see from history is that highway robbers have existed
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as long there were roads so for example angulimal who features like in the buddhist rathaka stories
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he was a notorious highway robber and this tradition continues the state did try
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historically to curb this menace and make things safer for example in the mahajanapatha period
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so around 600 bc there were officials who were appointed called rajukas whose job was to protect
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the travelers and the merchants that was their essential job of course there were also customs
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agents called the kamikas who would take money from them legitimate taxes and so on but in
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practice highway robbery has been a part and parcel of the transportation culture in india
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because we think of highway robbery as this violent dacoities and bandits who will come
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and attack you but highway robbery is also takes place when someone without any
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legitimacy and without any authority is taking money from you maybe not using the threat of
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violence itself but who's taking money from you in a matter of fact and you are giving it to them
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and that has continued across our history so we have like petty rajas so any sort of political
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authority who establishes himself in certain area he will say that okay whatever roads are passing
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through this these are under my control and anyone who is passing through the entry tax that we call
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it right now that sort of entry tax has been collected across history and shershasuri played
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a interesting role in curbing this because what he realized was all these highway robbers operate
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with the knowledge and the active cooperation of the village headmen which are around these
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highways so the village headmen were a very influential constituency at that time and so
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what he did was that he said if any dacoity or robbery takes place in your area it is a job of
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the village headman called the mukkadam to either find the culprit and compensate the traveler for
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the loss of his property and if someone is killed then it is the job of the mukkadam to
#
find the guy or you the mukkadam himself will lose his life so that's a bit drastic but
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it worked during his period at least and we have the writings of a mughal historian actually
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called Abbas Sherwani who writes about the kind of changes he brought. Now shershasuri as a figure
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is just fascinating he is one of my favorite figures from Indian history
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partly because he has so much to do with the development of the highway system in India and
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he was the one who renovated the uttara patta which what we know as the grand trunk road now
#
so he renovated it from across the entire terrain he also built new roads which from agra to
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gujarat agra to marwar and so on so he expanded the road network a lot firstly and he also built
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a network of thousands of sarais sarais being these resting places for travelers and many of
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these sarais later then grew to become kasbas they were the nucleus of urbanization so there
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would be a marketplace which would form around this sarai totally that marketplace would turn
#
into a small town and so that is how a lot of urbanization happened in India also like
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even today the mughal sarai begu sarai all these are prominent junctions right and the name reveals
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that they originated from a simple small sarai a resting house for travelers so that was another
#
one of his contributions overall i feel as a figure he is massively underrated in Indian history
#
partly because he is this sort of an upstart figure who rises from nowhere rags to riches
#
often uses unscrupulous means to gain power and he's not like the perfect role model say to say
#
for a newly independent India which was looking for you know these very straight targeted figures
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like Akbar and Ashoka whose values fit in with that of a budding nation like they are secular
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at the same time they are tolerant they are non-violent and all these factors led us to
#
privilege these figures other than Sheher Shah Suri who was a brilliant administrator
#
and he was also secular in his own way i mean he did not really discriminate
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as such in his army and so on in terms of recruitment and his administrative innovations
#
themselves were quite remarkable he introduced the rupaiya which we know as the rupee today
#
he introduced the use of hindi hindavi as it was known then in the local administration earlier
#
only persian was used so this led to good things for the local population so i'm basically a big
#
fan of Sheher Shah Suri and i think he should be more celebrated maybe a biopic someday maybe
#
a biopic someday if akshay kumar is listening to this we are in trouble rajat and it is your
#
fault and it's interesting that you talk about sort of building up Akbar and Ashoka as modern
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heroes because even there i mean people contain multitudes and even they had different aspects
#
to them and it's almost as if the you know they were at one point you know sort of presented as
#
these people with these very salutary sides of themselves Ashoka the man of peace and all of
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that and Akbar being secular and whatever when you know there were other aspects to their
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character as well and perhaps we'll really mature as a society when we can get closer to this
#
embracing of complexity i kind of smiled when you were talking about the mukaddams because i thought
#
all my listeners will immediately say ha here is where amit talks about incentives and that's
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actually a place to talk about incentives in two ways like one of course if you're telling the
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mukaddam that if you don't catch the thief i will behead you that is an incentive for the mukaddam
#
to do the job of policing well but it is also an incentive for him to catch any random guy he
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doesn't like and say that is a thief i have caught him behead him and end of a story so one you know
#
those go in different ways and that would also be unseen in a modern context because what would we
#
know of the the many people wrongfully implicated by medieval mukadams but you know coming back to
#
sort of your journeys it seems to me that when you travel especially when you travel in the way
#
that you are doing where you're going deeper into context and you know where traditions arise from
#
and so on you're not just traveling through space you're also traveling through time right you're
#
not just exploring india as it is today you're also exploring the history of india yeah also
#
get drawn to do sort of history writing and is travel writing to some extent history writing
#
is there a continuum and do you like you know you were earlier talking about the fascinating
#
history of truck art where you know 12th century ships could look like 21st century trucks and how
#
that's been documented so much in pakistan and so much of that is fascinating and then shesha suri
#
and all that so do you also then feel like writing a travel book sometime which is a travel through
#
time and not a travel through space as such which is just sort of historical you know i am a huge
#
history buff and the more i read history over the years i realized that travel accounts play such
#
a huge role in our reconstruction the reconstruction of our history as we know it and like right from
#
yuen sang to ibn battuta these guys have left such a pivotal account which give us so much specific
#
information about india at that point and it is so valuable but even in these accounts you know i find
#
that there is very little mention of the common people about the texture of ordinary life as it
#
was because these guys often hung around in noble circles their their audience itself was
#
often of a courtly background so probably they didn't mention they didn't find it important
#
enough to mention it and but there is so much poverty of these accounts of the ordinary people
#
i mean historians struggle so much to reconstruct how the life of an ordinary peasant or an ordinary
#
merchant would have been and that i feel really bad about it because it's so dominated by these
#
the doings of these kings and so on but i mean how much of that really mattered to the ordinary
#
peasant at that point i highly doubt much of it did so my motivation for travel writing you know
#
is for me travel writing is nothing but making the mundane interesting and just capturing the
#
texture of everyday life i mean there are other genres i mean a lot of non-fiction academic
#
research which gets deep into topics and presents a thoughtful analysis of them but for me travel
#
writing has a separate job which is to just document the ordinary and make it interesting
#
for the reader and who knows hopefully someday these accounts will serve as a way to recreate
#
history of the early 21st century i mean and that is my ultimate goal in the long term that is what
#
really motivates me and that's why i'm only interested in writing about the ordinary people
#
of india and what their life about their hopes or what they think these things often go undocumented
#
in other places i mean travel writing is the place to cover them and i feel very strongly about that
#
and yeah like i said i mean it's deeply connected with history right i mean our attitudes or the
#
particular positions the circumstances we find ourselves in various people have their own little
#
histories they're linked to their family and their caste and all of this is what is india for me i
#
mean for me you know just like we say that in every person resides god for me in every person
#
resides india and every person is a representative of india in so many ways and that is what i am
#
very moved to explore and write about hopefully in the future i'll get to write more so
#
you know that multiplicity of visions at an individual level is kind of fascinating to me
#
you know earlier in this episode you spoke about how we experience goa as tourists but truck drivers
#
experience it as you know a much more dangerous difficult place to navigate i remember in my years
#
playing poker professionally i encountered it in a whole different way which is kind of you know
#
quite apart from that and this is beautiful passage from your book which kind of speaks to that which
#
comes from where when sort of you are in the northeast and you go to sleep somewhere on the
#
highway in a truck and you wake up in the morning and you take a little walk and and the andarwalas
#
referred to here are of course the extremists that you're worried about and at this point you
#
write this passage i'll quote quote my fear of andarwalas interrupting our journey has been
#
unfounded instead i have witnessed one of the most splendid sunrises of my life i guess such
#
is the nature of travel when the true nature of a place reveals itself or perhaps when you realize
#
there is no true nature of a place it is merely the images we associate with the place that shape
#
our perception of it the human brain is incapable of associating more than a handful of things with
#
this its job is to underplay complexity and categorize reality into simplicity that's why
#
one must never internalize anything the world tells you about a place the only way to travel
#
is to forget everything you think you know about a place discover it anew forge new associations
#
associations that are all your own i for one knew that after this trip i will always remember this
#
sunrise when i think of nagaland and not insurgents or head hunting tribals stop quoting this was such
#
a beautiful passage in one of the the highlights of the book and this also you know leads to sort
#
of a conflict within the travel writer which in a very minor way i think i felt when you know in
#
earlier small travels i have made like when i was traveling through pakistan in 2006 and i live
#
blocked the event i would put up multiple posts in a day and i was blogging a lot and at one point
#
i realized that there is a danger here and the danger is that trying because of that imperative
#
that i have given myself of trying to find the extraordinary in the mundane where i might write
#
about a chalk and just imbue it with significance while for the person around there it's just a
#
chalk it's just a pillar you know and the other aspect of that of course is that as a local person
#
where i am in my cities whether it's mumbai or whatever and mumbai is also you know has so many
#
layers of you know all the different centuries and the influences that are here and both of us
#
of course are in mumbai right now although remote because of this dreaded pandemic so question there
#
is that then there is a straight off that on the one hand you want to take a step out where you're
#
suddenly more mindful of everything and therefore in a position to recognize the special where it
#
might otherwise be normalized but on the other hand there might also be the tendency for the
#
travel writer the imperative so to say the incentive almost to find something special
#
in everything that is ordinary is that something that you've thought about like how does one
#
navigate on the one hand the travel writer's gaze is going to be a little deeper but is there a
#
danger that it goes sort of too deep that's an interesting question i mean i have thought about
#
it in the sense that yeah it it is possible to go overboard in contextualizing a place
#
i mean often what happens is that you go a bit too deep i mean for the when i am writing i always
#
think about the reader and for me the reader is someone who like has a smartphone within range
#
and who's going to pick that up the moment you lose his attention so i that my attempts always
#
are to set the context but not to the extent where i am losing sight of the place i am in
#
you know often what happens is that you get into the history of a place and so on
#
and you lose sight of what is in front of you which often is mundane like you said
#
so there is that risk but uh overall i think the job of the travel writer is to open someone's eyes
#
to the fascinating realities of multiplicities of the world around you and of the ordinary person
#
who probably thinks yeah what the hell is this but the travel writer's job is to make him see the
#
beauty in it and for me that is what it is i mean i am someone who likes to see the beauty in everything
#
i mean i like it can get a bit annoying but i genuinely find a lot of things beautiful i mean
#
part of that comes from i think science i mean richard feinman was a huge influence on me when
#
i was growing up and the way he sees beauty in you know the smallest of phenomenon i mean the world
#
is a incredibly fascinating and beautiful place and it is that sort of enthusiasm for the world
#
which i wish to transmit through my writing and that is what i believe the purpose of travel
#
writings great so i've taken a lot of your time today so i'll kind of end with the final question
#
and at one point early in the book you talk about this truck driver sham and you're sort of traveling
#
with him and he says he likes kishore kumar and you ask him his favorite song and he you know names
#
a song and then you ask him to sing he sings a bit of that and then he feels embarrassed feeling
#
that he's revealed a bit of himself to you and and the lyrics of that lovely song of course are
#
and and this sort of seems to me to summarize so well that you know the loneliness of the long
#
distance trucker as we spoke about but is this something that you felt at the end of the book
#
that you know was there this sense of loss that you know these are all people who at different
#
levels you must have been close to like are you in touch with them have you sent your book to any of
#
them you've mentioned that you know after all the writing was done you were still whatsapping with
#
them and all of that what is that relationship like and also it must be a complicated one because
#
at one level they were instrumental to you in the sense that you were using them to go on a journey
#
and write a book but at the other level you have been upfront about what you want and they know
#
that and then on the basis of that your relationship is kind of building and there is a lot of warmth
#
there and you know one gets a sense of those little little intimacies that are scattered
#
through the book so what is it like now when you think of them and also having so many different
#
friends who are not from the earlier bubbles you were part of like engineering or journalism or
#
whatever does it change the way you look at people in general like people who are unseen to us in a
#
way you know maybe the beggar at the traffic signal or the person serving chai at the dhaba we go to
#
do you feel you kind of look at them differently and that your gaze has been impacted by these
#
experiences so you know as far as them being instrumental i wouldn't go as far to say that
#
because you know when i set out on the trip i had no idea i mean this book was ever going to come
#
out or i'm even going to write one i did it mainly to have some fun and make some friends along the
#
way so i mean i did take notes and all in case it comes handy someday but that possibility seemed
#
remote to me because what i was thinking at that point was who's going to read about truck driving
#
while i was interested in it but often there's this niggling doubt right is this something that's
#
interesting for the wider world and that self-doubt is something that eats you away in many ways so
#
that was how so we used to hang out like just like someone who i met and who are going to be
#
separated in some time so you speak all that you care in that in that particular time
#
over the years i have fallen out of touch also with them because what happens with truckers
#
especially you know they change so many phone numbers they keep changing their phone numbers
#
i don't know why and if they change their boss like if they start working for a different owner
#
then their number will change and they are constantly on the move right it is incredibly
#
difficult to talk to them on the phone because they are always busy they're either all driving
#
on the road and it's incomprehensible on the phone you know when you try to talk so all these
#
factors made it very difficult to keep in touch jora and jabdev were two people whom i did keep
#
in touch with i've also sent them a copy of my book so hopefully they like it because i don't
#
think if they can read english my next plan is to somehow get this translated to hindi or panjabi
#
because there is so much readership for these stories kind of stories from the
#
internet and even you don't even need to change the title of the book the title of the book remains
#
the same i hope to get it translated soon and yeah i mean how i see the wider world i think has
#
remained the same i mean i've always been curious about the underclass about someone who
#
we don't ordinarily meet in our circles and so on so that part has remained the same though my
#
understanding of the world of truckers definitely has improved but the way i view the larger world i
#
think has probably remained the same which is something that motivated me to go on this trip in
#
the first place and and finally are you are you writing something now is there something your
#
devoted readers such as myself can expect from you are you taking one for the team in one way
#
or another so that we can read a great book oh yeah i am working on my second travel book
#
so i've signed something with harper collins and it should come out in the next couple of years
#
quite excited it's another uh i'm going to explore another class of itinerants who we don't get to
#
read much about but it's all going to be about the ordinary people of india and their relationship
#
with the world with god and all these things so it's quite excited about it and yeah hopefully
#
the readers will like you will enjoy it sounds fascinating and i can't wait i'll i won't take
#
any more of your time because i want you to get back to writing that book which i'm so eager to
#
read uh raju thank you so much for your time and your insights uh and you know having the patience
#
to sit through all these technical difficulties as we record this episode i appreciate that
#
thank you so much amit entirely my pleasure thank you
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode do head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
#
and pick up rajat upekar's wonderful book truck day india a hitchhiker's guide to hindustan you can
#
follow rajat on twitter at rajat ub that's one word you can follow me at amit varma a-m-i-t
#
v-a-r-m-a you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i-n thank
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i-n slash support and contribute any
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