Sirhind
At about 9:30 in the morning today, Prateek drove us to Sirhind from Chandigarh in his car. We were there in about two hours from then. Sirhind is a very small city that comes under the Fatehgarh Sahib district in Punjab. While entering the city we crossed an over bridge when we saw a fleet of trucks being parked, and bags of rice were being unloaded from those trucks and loaded onto the good train. It was the perfect time and place to be at to understand the business relationship between the rail and road transportation of India.
After spending an hour documenting this process through still shots and video footages, we headed over to Grand Trunk Road, which is known for the truck body building workshops. It wasn’t a difficult task to get there. As we strolled around the entire market area, a few kilometers away, we found dozens of workshops that were selling accessories to decorate trucks. Hundreds of people were working in order to create a piece of art out of scraps of wood and metal. We knew that we were going to be extremely busy documenting this process until the sunset.
As it was an extremely hot summer day with the mercury rising up to almost 46 degree Celsius (115 F), we had to buy a lot of bottles of water to keep us hydrated. And because of the high temperature even the coolant of the car was giving us some grief. However, once we started to move from workshop to workshop, documenting trucks and interviewing various people, we kind of forgot about the heat. We spoke to truck drivers, helpers, truck painters, workshop owners, vinyl makers etc. The people employed in the workshops were initially amused seeing us with our camera equipment and all, but slowly they got used to us being around and started to be cooperative while giving us answers to all our questions. We got to know that most of the trucks from UP, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Leh, Laddakh etc came to Sirhind to get decorated.
Apparently, the workshops in Sirhind are considered to have lot of reputation in the truck body building community. The place is like Mecca for truckers.
We got to see the various stages of truck bodybuilding and decoration (coloring, writing and putting embellishments). The main attraction of the trucks from the northern part of India are their high and tall planks that covered the back of the trucks. These truck backs are painted with various sceneries or things ranging from leaping lions to village sunsets to a pair of doves or an eagle.
After collecting information all day long, when the batteries of our cameras started dying out one by one, we decided to call it a day. The sun had almost set, and people had started shutting shops. One thing we missed out on was getting to document the process of the back of a truck being painted. We did have a lot of pictures of the already-painted truck backs though, but somewhere in our hearts we wanted to see the whole process of it. And as luck would have it, when we started driving out of there, just about a 100 meters away, there was a truck being painted, even the back portion of it. We immediately pulled over, got out with our shooting equipment, and started documenting with whatever juice that was left in our cameras. By the end of the day, we knew that today was by far the best day of our research trip. Happily, we returned back to Chandigarh.
