Highway encounters with trucks — those thunderous mega-masses of steel, kitschy art and tacky couplets — aren’t exactly calculated to enhance the joy of travel. Shrieking, high-decibel horns ablare, they command right of way with a badass swagger that intimidates other vehicles lower down the pecking order of automobiles into yielding. And, yet, these rajas of the road are in many ways the lifeline of the economy, carting everything from alu-pyaaz to passenger cars up and down the 33-lakh- kilometre network of Indian roads. And a whole ecosystem (and an ethno- sphere), which we don’t always see or experience as we hurtle through life in the fast lane, exists just to keep these engines of the economy humming.
This coffee-table photobook on trucking in India, commissioned and published by logistics and supply chain managers Safexpress, pays artful tribute to the machines, the men who command them, and indeed the entire universe that sustains — and is in turn sustained by — trucking operations. The publishers say they intended it in order to raise awareness among policymakers and government agencies about the grossly inadequate infrastructure and other limitations in which truckers operate in India.
Whether that objective is realised or not, the book serves a far more effective function by rendering visible — and ‘humanising’ — the fascinating world of truckers. A panel of international photographers travelled, in trucks themselves and like the truckers themselves, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to provide a fresh outside-in perspective to the seemingly mundane aspects of truckers’ lives.
What we’re given, then, is a conducted tour of life on the highway, and in small-town India that makes for a fascinating sociological study of an India on the move. So vivid are the photographs that you can virtually smell the engine oil (and, at dhaba stops, the aroma of soul food) lift off the pages. Journeying thus, the book captures every aspect of trucking, down even to the bribe-demanding cops and licence inspectors, and the hazards of plying on poor roads and the loneliness of the long-distance trucker. But it also induces chuckles aplenty: as with the quirky twist on a family planning slogan painted on a truck: “Hum do, hamare do/Unke badh jitney bhi ho/ Sabko Punjab aur Haryana bhej do.” And the photograph of two elephants, on two trucks, reaching out with their trunks for a jumbo farewell is, well, awww-inspiring.