Interview: Rajat Ubhaykar, author of Truck De! India, speaks about humanising India’s truck-drivers, their contribution to the Indian economy, and the excitement and dangers of life on the road.

- Kamakshi Ayyar

Have you ever wondered what it takes to get the gadgets you order online, or the crisp Kashmiri apples you enjoy at breakfast or the car you drive from their point of origin to you? The costs, number of people and distances involved? Probably not. It's easy to forget about the background logistics when everything is simplified to just a click.

A new book aims to explore one segment of the overlooked supply chain in India: truck drivers. Journalist-turned-author Rajat Ubhaykar’s Truck de India! raises the curtains on the men who ply their vehicles across the length and breadth of the country. The job is thankless, the hours unforgiving, and the role crucial; yet almost nothing is known about the truckers or the world their inhibit.

“My motivation was the simple fact that, 70 years after independence, not a single person has written about truck drivers, who are probably the most crucial component of the economy,” Ubhaykar said. “It seemed really strange to me that nobody had explored their lived reality at all.”

Ubhaykar spent months hitchhiking with truckers through swathes of north and south India, gleaning nuggets about their lives⁠—what pushes them to choose these difficult lives (“...all I wanted was my music,” one said), the cunning tricks highway robbers use during a heist, why CDs of Bollywood movies could get drivers in trouble in Manipur.