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Rajat Ubhaykar

Tag Archives: trucks

Trucking on NH39: India’s most dangerous highway

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by rajatu in Fueling India, Travel

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AFSPA, army, Dimpaur, Goods, Illegal, Imphal, India, Insurgency, Kohima, Manipur, Myanmar, Nagaland, North East, NorthEast, Travel, truck drivers, truckers, trucks

A soldier keeps watch as trucks pass through NH39

A soldier keeps watch as trucks pass through NH39

By no stretch of imagination is Dimapur, the commercial hub of Nagaland, a pleasant place to live in. On a damp Sunday morning, it feels like I have walked into a tropical war zone — there is a strange uneasiness in the air and the roads have been chiselled away by passing trucks and frequent downpours into an uneven slush of concrete and mud: a consequence of frictional forces and persistent civic indifference. Continue reading →

Witnessing the ancient migration of Kashmiri Gujjar nomads

27 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by rajatu in Fueling India, Travel

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army, goats, Gujjar, Himalayas, India, J&K, Kashmir, migration, nomads, summer, transhumance, Travel, trucks

Home » Enterprise » Trend » A season of exodus A Season Of Exodus A truck ride through J&K in our special series, The Highway Economy Rajat UbhaykarAUG 25 , 2015 Photographs by Ozzie Hoppe A Gujjar family has finally found a ride and are loading their belongings, which include cloth bags bound by coir, and bundles of wood to keep them warm in the mountain pastures

A Gujjar family has finally found a ride and are loading their belongings, which include cloth bags bound by coir, and bundles of wood to keep them warm in the mountain pastures

The sun is high up in the sky and a column of dilapidated trucks trundling past kick up an opaque cloud of dust, enveloping everything in a fine layer of golden brown grime. I discover the muddy imprint of a dust-sweat admixture when I wipe my forehead with a handkerchief. The mercury has easily crossed 40 degrees Celsius here at the Transport Nagar along the NH44 in Jammu — a vast unpaved transitory home for trucks — much to everybody’s discomfort, and the ferocious sun beating down mercilessly is making my head throb. This must be the forewarnings of a sunstroke, I think, and plod to the nearest watermelon stand. Continue reading →

The Ustad Truck Decorators of Sirhind

24 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by rajatu in Fueling India, Reportage, Travel

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accidents, Art, India, Indian trucks, outsider art, Punjab, roads, Sirhind, Transport, transportation, Travel, truck art, trucks

Photos by Ozzie Hoppe. Truck cabins have an underlying exoskeleton made of sal wood, which is why one can often see them crushed beyond recognition in grisly accidents.

Photos by Ozzie Hoppe. Truck cabins have an underlying exoskeleton made of sal wood, which is why one can often see them crushed beyond recognition in grisly accidents.

Barring an inconspicuous rectangular piece of metal engraved with ‘Mewa Singh & Co’ nailed to the side of the cabin door, in no way does Jorawar Singh’s truck betray the fact that it has been fashioned entirely by the human hand in a cacophonous karkhana and not assembled en masse out of a sterile company facility. Nor could anybody gather the truck body is wooden in its basic composition. To the lay eye, the truck body appears to be but a mere extension of the engine — a forbidding mass of metal you wouldn’t want to overtake on the wrong side of the highway. The reality, however, is much more fascinating. Continue reading →

The Fragile Art of Existence: Our First Real Encounter With Truck Drivers

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by rajatu in Fueling India, Reportage, Social, Travel

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business, India, Indian trucks, logistics, mechanics, social, Transport, trucks

Words by: Rajat Ubhaykar & Photos by: Ozzie Hoppe

AS A PART OF OUR preliminary research, we visited truck terminals in and around Mumbai and had a great time hanging out with these warm, gutsy individuals who welcomed us into their lives without a flicker of hesitation. Continue reading →

Art From The Heart

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by rajatu in Fueling India, Reportage, Travel

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Art, highways, India, outsider art, transportation, truck drivers, truckers, trucks

Introductory blogpost for my project with photographer Ozzie Hoppe commencing in the last week of March. Do visit our website.

Words by: Rajat Ubhaykar & Photos by: Ozzie Hoppe

TRUCKS IN INDIA are not merely motored beasts of burden. Neither are they a gender-neutral ‘it’. Most truck drivers only refer to their vehicles as an affectionate ‘she’, as a sturdy companion offering both the warm intimacy of a devoted wife and the security of their faraway homes. Perhaps, that is the reason drivers embellish their vehicles with the attention to detail usually reserved for a bejewelled bride on her wedding night. One can only indulge in symbolic speculation, for the origins of this socio-cultural phenomenon remains obscured in mystery.

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However, what’s undeniable is that colourful hand-painted trucks are one of the signature highway spectacles of the Indian subcontinent, often making dreary road trips a near-psychedelic experience. Truck art motifs include the ubiquitous Horn Ok Please, roses, peacocks, lotuses, elephants, an eagle perched on a globe, verdant village scenes, suckling cows, a pair of doves, religious verses, mythological totems, auspicious sayings signifying favourable luck on hazardous roads and warding off evil eyes, among many others. However, the surface uniformity of truck motifs can be deceiving since it belies a few choice personal flourishes: most trucks also reflect their owners’ personal life mottos in the form of witty aphorisms and unsolicited bits of startlingly personal advice.

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Also, while the first impression of decorated truck bodies is a riot of bright colours, they hide behind their exuberant facades a wealth of subtle markers which are telling signs of which state the truck was decorated in. For the abundance of truck art is testimony to an underground and unsung army of painters who decorate trucks while paying heed to an unspoken and undocumented aesthetic convention, one that is passed across generations as a traditional family occupation. Significantly, most truck decorators consider themselves artists and not craftsmen, thus cementing their occupation’s position as classic outsider art.

Sources in the transportation industry tell us that some of the bigger hubs for truck decoration are Indore, Jodhpur, Vijaywada, Sirhind and Belgaum. We will be visiting these places in the course of our project and glean from truck decorators the reasons for this uncanny consistency in motifs sans any organized means of perpetuation and in the process, gain an anecdotal history of this uniquely subcontinental phenomenon.

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