Fuelling India: Discovering the lives of Indian truck drivers first-hand
Truck drivers… We’ve never really given them much thought. In many ways, they exemplify the marginalized wheels that keep India moving, inhabiting its vast, shadowy ‘informal sector’ that employs four out of five Indians.
But what are those long days and nights on the highway for truckers actually like? To find out, Rajat Ubhaykar ventured on a 10,000 km journey across India hitchhiking on trucks, covering over twenty states in six months. In this talk, Rajat will speak about his experiences on the road and share what he’s learnt on his travels, from the genesis of truck art to the structural causes behind the ubiquity of overloading. He will also discuss the evolution of travel writing as a genre in India, and how it has immense potential to generate empathy and curiosity about India’s informal sector; achieve a more granular exploration of India’s stunning regional diversity; and in doing so, capture India’s fascinatingly uneven engagement with modernity.