Ever since I heard the Grateful Dead, I've thought of trucking as something kind of romantic, and yet it's also deeply poignant. On the one hand, the wide open highways, meeting new people, seeing new places, a kind of freedom from the fetters to carry down most of us. On the other hand, a life without roots, no sense of family traveling all over. Yes, but constrained in a box with wheels. You think truckers in India would know this vast and beautiful land more than most of us.

But do they spend their time travelling in a moving cocoon? Always on the move? Yes, but they're nearly trapped. For a trucker, the journey is the destination. And that's usually a bug, not a feature.

Welcome to the Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host of its Vardaman. Welcome to the scene of The Unseen. My guest today is Roger Baker, who got the strange guitar a few years ago of traveling around India in a truck. And that's exactly what he did. He went from Mumbai to Kashmir and then to the northeast and then to south India, hitchhiking on trucks, making friends with truck drivers, getting a sense of their lives and journeys.

And he wrote about it in a wonderful book called Truck Day India A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Sun. I was delighted to have graduate on the scene and The Unseen as he battled through a litany of technical issues as if we were recording from a moving truck when I recorded smoking. I do so using this ossicles and Angostura and I also keep Zuman on mute. So my guest and I can see each other and pick up visual cues for this recording for us and costarring work.

And then indeed Burzum did not. And we tried Google Hangouts and that didn't work. And we tried Skype and that didn't work. And then we tried WhatsApp video call and we could only record half a session. So we resumed a couple of days later when Roger's Internet behaved itself and we finally wrapped up the episode. Our conversation was a hell of a trip and I mean that in a good way.

If you enjoy listening to the scene on the scene, you can play a part in keeping the show alive. The scene in The Unseen has been a labor of love for me. I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe, and hopefully yours as well. But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show. Although the scene in the scene is great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken up to the insane engagement level of what goes.

And I do many, many hours of deep research for each episode. Besides all the logistics of producing the show myself, scheduling guests, booking studios, being technicians to travel and so on. So I'm trying a new way of keeping the thing going. And that involves my proposition for you is this for every episode of the scene in The Unseen that you enjoy. Buy me a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch. Whatever you feel is what you can do.

This by heading over to see an unseen audience to support and contributing an amount of your choice. This is not a subscription. The scene in The Unseen will continue to be free on Allport concepts and at scene unseen I and this is just a gesture of appreciation. Help keep the thing going. Scene on scene not and slash support. Welcome to the scene in The Unseen, thanks. You know, I have to tell our listeners that I am getting a sense of the rhythm of book because in his book, there's a lot of weeping and a lot of hanging around is waiting for trucks and waiting for traffic jams to resolve themselves because of started this recording exactly one hour late because we had technical issues versus encaustic wasn't working and the zoom wasn't working.

And we tried a bunch of other things and we finally got around to recording. But never mind. Better late than never. And, you know, maybe that's the enjoyment of the journey comes from all these little moments in between, though, I think technical glitches don't add anything to one's life before we start talking about this fascinating book. Tell me a little bit about your personal journey, because, you know, you are an engineer who then did the journalism and won an award for it, who then went traveling around India on trucks.

And you have just joined the civil services so deeply to this sort of very interesting journey of yours and how you came to writing policy, because that sort of seems to be the one great passion of your life writing and traveling.

It's definitely been an interesting to me so far.

So I said my personal background because I basically came from the that I was born in Portugal and brought up largely part of my schooling, was also in a military school. And after that, I joined I began to study electrical engineering. Writing and reading have been abiding passions in my life as far as I remember from my time at the member scouring the second nine people trying to find some elements of any novel that would excite me. So I'd like to stay here and I'm interested in reading these.

Environmental engineering was like many other things like this and Moxey. I made the most sense and I don't regret it at all because of a background in science I feel is definitely helpful, especially in any city. So I don't regret it. Although I made some amazing people in my book who continue to be so intellectual that in my 30 or 40 years I finally decided that I wanted to get into journalism.

Essentially, it was I did not want to do a desk job in my early 20s. I had this deep hunger to see as much of India as possible. And I don't I'm going to put it in the first place, but I'm from Bombay. But I did not want to be stuck in Bombay because to my parents, whatever. And so I decided to join. I became to connect the to of my life together, wanting to see as much of India as possible.

And I worked for the year after graduation in a management consultancy, Commodities and Gold. So I thought I'd give the corporate world or try before putting it all together, just to make sure I wanted to into this for my own time prospection. And also I joined the College of Journalism. And from there on I worked as a business journalist for a couple of years in Bombay. And while working as a business journalist, I really decided that I had to go on this trip across India, though.

So you don't deny I had been with me since my college days, so I don't write in the book, but in my first year in one of them, they were very kindly rescued us from lying to many of us stranded on the highway in the ocean. And that sort of started with me and the idea of their lives. And I started in my early 20s. I should do something like that. But still, only by the time I was around 20 to and and one fine day I walk into my editor's office and I did I have this crazy idea in my mind.

I want to travel a lot and so I want to retire. So because of this, you to give me one, give me a holiday. I would like to be for a month or so, but you don't know to be much more sensible than I was. She suggested that I go six part series for the magazine and I don't get it. I mean, I thought I wouldn't get a better chance. I mean, I'm getting serious. I would advise you to give me elevator.

So I thought this will get better. I laid out at one point, even in positions of responsibility.

So it all worked out somehow lucky, and that's been brought me and apart from that recently, I have examined so well that makes me feel you might just after all the things you wrote about sort of the day to the state in your book, not in so many words.

Those are my words. But that's whether the democracy can kind of be sweetly ironic. You're sort of joining the service and hopefully making things better. Now, I know it's kind of futile or fun to ask a reader what kind of writing do they like, because I think a lot of readers who are drawn to this voracious hunger for just reading anything that they can get their hands on. It's not a fair question to your reading will naturally tend to be eclectic.

But given that you also love to travel and love seeing new faces and all of that, which is good bookstores, books have been to other places. But was it also an attraction that for two people who write about travel and write about going to places like weather models for you to do as a it? I didn't think that's the kind of thing I want to write and so on. So one book, which I distinctly remember leaving an impression on me was something I read when I was a kid.

It's this book called A Three Man by Unsafety. So what Sean was it is possible to write about Indiana's working class, its informal economy, so to say, in sensitive manner, in an entertaining, informative manner, because the lives of ordinary black people in so many ways, we are unaware of the myriad struggles that we go to bars which people employing and what they're likely to do. So Digable, which is a mouthful of a bunch of four delirious liberals and all that, but I thought I have to do something about cocktails.

I mean, their life is in some ways more fascinating than that of dealing with liberals, because at the end of the landscapes, they're exposed to the kind of characters that are exposed to on a daily basis seem to me to be material supportable.

And I could say that definitely was a huge influence on them. And apart from that, if that's part of the writing style is concerned, I am are towards the more simple writing rather than the more flowery writing. It is difficult to pull off. I mean, except for a few exceptions like Moorhouse, who can pull off that sort of thing so beautifully. I have always been attracted toward simplicity in writing.

So as one of the models around the world are concerned of Hemingway, definitely whether during the final years of my college was like an influence.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, come to my arms because I teach this course on writing and I often when I talk about writing and, you know, I say George Orwell's famous so called good prose is like a window. The whole point being that the window pane is a means to an end and therefore know grows like a window pane. Should just be clear. Window pane is supposed to show you what's in the other side and not draw attention to itself. And the example I gave of an exception to that is the same one you gave, which is Woodhouse a bit.

You know, in his case, the beautiful things that he does with the prose is an end in itself, and that's fine. But one should not get carried away by that because everybody cannot be a good husband. And I like the clarity in your style and also sort of the conversational feel of it. And, you know, you throw in a lot of sort of light touches of humor to just go both places, which really worked for me.

Was it a process that you went through in sort of finding your voice, as it were, the voice of the book, so to say? Or is it something that was very clear from the start? Or did you sort of have to experiment a bit and try to be till you discovered what the right voice would be?

Initially, I found myself getting bogged down in these long winded sentences.

I mean, the initial process was quite a bit of a struggle. My basic in this book was, well, beautiful. Done. What do you mean? I did not want to he or may be to get bored at any point in the sense, even though I had some interesting facts to share or anything which I find to be interesting, but essentially the reader may not because of too long winded, although it's been going on for a while. So in that sense, it went to a constant process of refinement, the end goal being sure whether readers attention.

And we also easily distracted these days. And I think the job of writing is to make it as easy as possible. And that is the most challenging part of the process. Consistent of the finding that I do not believe in the draft system, I mean, I don't think I get confused that there are seven of them. So I didn't really leave until I never really finished until it meets a certain level of satisfaction, until the national process.

When I was struck by the score at the start of your book by John Steinbeck, where he says, quote, We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip. A trip takes us stuccoed, which, you know, would appear to the reader as written in the context of the book that is to follow. But it also struck me that it has a broader resonance. And that's sort of what I want to ask you about in the sense that, you know, you said you did engineering and engineering has its own sort of subcultures and Lingle's and ways of speaking and ways of thinking about the world.

Similarly, after that, you go to the ACG and you get into journalism. And journalism also has its own little subculture, depending on where you are. And then you go around the country with these structures. And there, as you've described so beautifully, there are all these little subcultures and rituals and these words that you inhabit, which are in fact, as you've shown in the book, different from place to place. It's one thing in the north, another thing in the northeast and so on and so forth.

And this kind of got me to thinking about how our experiences shape us so profoundly, because it struck me while reading the book that some of these subcultures would have nothing in common with the other ones, like the engineering subculture and the trucking subculture, where, you know, there are a few things in common, such as the technology that people use WhatsApp and make Facebook friends from other countries. But apart from that, the worlds are so different they relate to other people so differently and all of this.

So do you find that as sort of a visitor in these different worlds that you can take a step back and look at your friends in each of these worlds and that their worldview in some ways constricted because of the relative narrowness of their experiences never being questioned on the ground?

I 100 percent agree with this great quote in the book, English almost actually that I never allow my friends from different solutions to ever meet. That would be two worlds colliding because we often have these little bubbles. And what I see the world as is composed of these little brothers who think that the entire world was around. And I mean, many of my friends are in the startup or know the stock of bubble is other world. I forget that. I mean, when I go to meet them and sometimes it's like I want to go out there for a while.

At the same time that I'm in journalism, of course, is the I mean, one of the reasons why I got into journalism was to sort of partake of these different bubbles, at least get a glimpse of these different worlds and expand my worldview to their number.

One of the reasons I went into journalism and yes, I would definitely say that having this sort of limited way too often I've seen at the moment imagine the world is very limited for the options themselves are so limited after graduation, either you join the corporate world and all you get into a startup or you start studying for. These are broadly the Audioboo for the masters of the law. And it's essentially limited to these options. And I would say as the removal of traveling across India opened my eyes in so many ways, which I hope to have shared with the people, and I will learn something about the many Indians that I know.

And it was also fascinating for me. Like I remember back in my days as a professional poker player, I would play with biofuels. I would have to play with all kinds of I used to play on the ground cash games in Bombay. I love to play with all kinds of people I would otherwise not interact with. So whether it's a group of builders in Vashi, I played with film stars and Versova and, you know, one group I used to play with.

And there were people who had grown up going to your local artists Chalco every week and were hardcore sort of some guys in that sense and absolutely lovely people. Right. And what happens in the culture is that given whichever bubble you are part of, will sometimes demonize people from different bubbles and not sort of, you know, be completely devoid of a deeper understanding of why other people are the way they are. And they are also three dimensional and they contain multitudes and all of that.

Given that you were interacting, given that you wanted to travel and therefore all of these. Different interests and factions seem to have coalesced towards this particular journey that you took, but what drew you to the idea of this particular book? Like you mentioned, October helped you when you were stranded in Shimla a long time ago. What in particular was sort of the expectation that you took into it? And did that differ from your experience eventually? Because sometimes I imagine what can happen is that you can go into something with a romantic notion that, hey, I'm going to travel the country in a truck and I'm going to soak up all the different cultural influences.

And at the end of it, I'll have this masterpiece. And then you actually go and you're just sitting around for 12 hours waiting at a traffic jam to not go with guys who want nothing but to viewpoint on your phone. So, you know, within sort of moments like that when expectations differ from reality, or did you go into it with the attitude that everything is an unknown, unknown? I just finished the journey and then I start forming narratives.

I mean, my expectations while I was going for the journey, my only expectation was that we had to come out of the life we own. I, I did not have any preconceived notions. I guess I must have shared some of the sort of studio life that all of us subconsciously that we are drawn closer to one state or next one may say that in some form of truth. So I now share those.

But I went in with a blank slate and prepared mentally for all sorts of physical limitations, all sorts of numbers on the way and broadly lived up to those expectations and those ends.

I was like to expect anything out of them is how I set out on the journey. And then my first of the first time that he was someone who was connected to me by a friend who knew someone was working in our transport office. So that was a connection. After that, I was essentially one. I had no idea how I would find another couple when I would go. So that was a huge unknown out there. And it was a source of considerable anxiety.

And again, because I had no idea how I would actually manage it one of those things. But as the journey progressed slowly, my expectations also started becoming more clear. The since what can I expect from people? But they were also always a delight. I mean, all these expectations were never really there because there are hundreds of different kinds of proposals and personality of everyone, because I know every every doctor to get in, get inside is of another world.

I mean, you the people are different.

Their stories are different. I mean, that's what I really enjoy about India in some way, you know? I mean, there's this particular vantage point on the Indian middle class and the upper middle class, which sort of views the rest of India as the great unwashed, homogenous mass of people will say to the other side what's left of what. I really enjoy seeing it in the particular histories that are contained within each person, their own life stories, their own background, their family history and everything so, so much about India.

I know it's a great learning experience and meeting someone outside of your own solutions and getting to really know that the background. So it's an education.

And that's what this because I mean, I was hoping that we're getting an education and this is definitely and, you know, in our normal lives or rather in our sort of regular lives, I would not say this, not normal in that sense, but in our regular lives, we are all sort of constantly anxious about how other people perceive us. And in most of our lives, that anxiety is about we want to seem knowledgeable and sophisticated and smart and all of that.

But I imagine here that it's a different kind of anxiety because you you know, there is a difference of class and privilege. And for you, the tension must have been, how do I fit in? I don't want them to feel as if I'm coming at them from a place that is above them, you know, not just in terms of class or whatever, but even your approach and all that. So how do you sort of deal with that?

Was there that anxiety that how do you know, how do I fit in and should I do with then what kind of language should I use? How did you navigate all of those things that that anxiety definitely was there to begin with.

So what I did was before setting out on the journey, I was offered a couple of documents, this huge one and another one in Guatemala.

And then after the dust was to get a sense of what they are like in reality. The kind of warmth and generosity, the best all even their very big part of the show, if your intentions are genuine, if you don't want to listen to them, and if you're going to be to the people who will answer all your questions happy because they have so many grievances inside them over the years, which no one has ever cared for or asked or dressed in any way, that if there's someone who is asking them genuine questions about what problems they face, what their life has been like, more than happy to answer.

So I went in with the expectation that I should just be a genuine person if my intentions are I don't have any vested interests and if I actually go there and if I do care about their lives in some way that comes out of when you're interacting with strangers, then realizes that your eyes and ears might be a lot more you and about your intentions and of human being. Other human beings can definitely see the. You know, I'm reminded of the title of this great book, which came out a few decades ago by violence to the loneliness of the long distance runner, and it seemed, you know, you could also have something called the loneliness of the long-Distance truck.

And is that part of the reason, like, I'm assuming when you see that they were warmer and nicer towards you than you might have expected or that, you know, the middle class types about the unwashed might lead you to believing you think that's part of the reason is that they're always on the road. Those personal connections aren't really happening, like the way you've kind of described the mini versions of each of these structures. It seems like, you know, they'll be two or three people traveling together in a truck.

And that's like, you know, that's their whole world. And a lot of other stuff is very foreign and they must be sort of craving to talk to other people. You know, is that sort of sense also that you go out of the Kirkos life?

Yes, I think that because of most of the truckers, I think were very lonely, so lonely. And especially when you are alone, like so many of them don't even have a lawsuit. So I'm not alone. It's an immensely monotonous job with the fewer distractions. I mean, we stop and have some sort of natural tendency to want to. But that's pretty much everything I know when someone like me, for instance, asks them to get into the automobile company.

I mean, it's just. To unload all of the baggage that I've accumulated over the years, so definitely that they play a part in shaping their attitudes towards me as this sort of privileged person in then midst.

Yeah, I mean I mean, one of the things that I was kind of struck by curiosity and your book gave so many fascinating glimpses of it was what is the interior life of a trucker? You know, and obviously there's no sort of one answer to this. But I was struck by this fascinating quote from someone Quantium who you said was a man of your words. And at one point when you ask him that, why did you come into trucking?

He says this little bit, which I'm going to read out, because I found it so fascinating when he says, quote, In a word, music in Congress is Australia had many cousins who drove trucks. They would allow me to ride with them sometimes and play songs all along the way. Those are some of the best memories I have. That's when I decided I should get into this line, drive trucks to distant places, listening to music all along.

I was not interested in studies. All I wanted was my music stopped and I found it so interesting. And you talk about how, you know, all his music was so sort of carefully curated on the USB drive, which you would have and so on. And it's such a fascinating story. And you think of how this person, placed in a different social context, could leave a totally different place, like someone with a passion for music, born in a good family in Delhi or in a Bollywood family in Bombay would be a whole different thing.

And this person's way of indulging this passion is sort of to become a truck driver. At another point, another trucker, you ask the same question to another truck, go somewhere else. And he replied, quote unquote, Should I tell you I've done almost everything that a man can do. I've been a truck driver, dealer, grapes, a lot of mechanical salesmen and more don't stick to any job for more than two years. But I'm old now.

I don't have energy left anymore. Stop. Go and do this. You commented on this by writing, quote, It's a sort of self description most working class men in India would have given if only someone else. And India's informal sector does have a way of making ordinary people multifaceted. And it struck me that here that there are you know, you talk a lot in your book about a particular kind of jugaad, which is that you're figuring out a way to make something work, whether it is, you know, cooling bottles of water by putting them on the windshield where the wind blows against them or another.

But it seems to me that even beyond the jugaad of immediate functionality, there is also a jugaad of life where in a certain way, given the poverty in this country, given the scarcity is given the lack of opportunities many people have, which, you know, your whole life becomes a way of sort of going against different values, being buffeted this way and that way and all the time doing jugada. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. So all of this, whether you're a tailor or a grape seller, auto mechanic or a truck driver, it's different kinds of geegaws at time.

Is this something you got a sense of? And was there sort of a poignancy that you felt, which I, as a reader, reading your wonderful book certainly did, of the helplessness of these sort of lives and the fact that these guys are so cheerful and they're going along and they're in whatever.

What was that sort of sense like the I mean, the overwhelming sense that I get from my brothers is that of wasted potential. They see so many, so many blind people. I mean, it's obvious that they're blind, given the right circumstances could have become anything. The wonder that I feel is the fundamental tragedy of India, the wasted potential, whether it be sports, whether it be on the like, there's all kinds of talent. All the people are so smart.

I mean, we need this kind of reduction of smartness to academic performance is does not do justice to the various kinds of intelligence that Indians have. Kind of the point that you said about being multifaceted, that is something that occurred again and again. I mean, just to make ends meet, people learn all kinds of skills. They know in different languages that more can be how you start speaking Malayalam lingo within a year. That is this isn't one of them.

That is what we should be. And then the old in India.

And I feel that it's definitely a sign when I think about it, but it's also a way to be free.

And, you know, the book that I talked about on Freeman Bermondsey, I did essentially how often many people who live day to day, they are just pursuing freedom. I mean, what we perceive as a job and as a lifetime that. We have to. These are the constraints that bind us all forms in some way, but it could be argued that a truly free person is someone who does not have these large forces of a general who is Keeping Them Honest, like there's this report by Leonard Cohen.

Like a bird on the wire, like a dog in a very nice, quiet riot in Miami will be free. And that really speaks to me.

And it sort of encapsulates the lives of all the Indians that I met on the road.

You know, another thing that kind of made me very sad in the book was a sense of how, you know, world views can be so constricted and constrained by what you experience. I mean, we spoke about it earlier about these different subcultures. And, you know, you described it as, you know, all these bubbles which exist and don't intersect. And obviously, we can talk about how ingenious babus stops them from so many experiences and seeing whatever.

But in the case of the truckers, it seems even more poignant to me, because once you get into that trucking life, which, you know can happen when you're in your mid teens, for example, you know, you've spoken of people in the book coming into it as a policy, a policy, by the way, for the listeners as an apprentice to a truck driver who will ride around within four to two years and perform our jobs and then eventually graduate to become a driver.

So that's your guru shishya in a sense of trucking and people become classes when they are in their teens. And then it strikes me that what they know of the world is so limited because many of them that have smartphones, especially in the west and the South, as you pointed out, a couple of truckers who will get better smartphones, you you know, and there might be some influences coming from there, but they're close to so much of the world.

And one example of this which really stayed with me was you spoke with a community truck driver who was explaining to you the problem between India and Pakistan, the problem of Kashmir. And to him it all came down to apples. You said the apples of Kashmir are so good that Indians don't want the apples to go to Pakistan and Pakistan is closer. And that's why the army has to occupy Kashmir, which is stunning, which is stunning and yet so rational for someone who is who may not have experienced about any of the discord between these two countries and all of these big geopolitical currents other than the beauty of these apples, you know, and appreciation for them.

And obviously, they were different subcultures because we went to so many different places. But is that something that also kind of struck you and you know what you're thinking while you were on your travels?

Because there is a certain degree of insularity among us, because maybe think of them as these all in the war of words. The fact is their circle is quite limited. They mostly hang out with the middle and passed on from the one village, maximum of them from their own cities and so on. And of course, Darvas, which specify what kind of Nevada. And I just I mean, I've been worried about. So then the elite from these regions will specifically go to these very important people belonging to the area.

And I know and their groups are safe and so their world is quite insular. And I would say a lot of interaction with other forces are usually negative. I mean, any person outside of the room, the environment, the leader of the horizon, or extort money from them. So the perception of the outside world is not necessarily adequate because the kind of stigma that they have in society that got with hostility and suspicion at large, I mean, in any random person off the street, you ask them, is very likely to want to be negative.

So they themselves also have this sort of this distrust of the larger society. And in many ways, they also internalize this. But I status in society later on American lives that were described himself as belonging to the same piece of which is essentially someone who does not belong in a respectable society, who is an outcast in some ways. So that's sort of self-description really struck me because they have internalized the lowly standards in society, many of them in the South.

I met many women. I don't picture from anyone whether or know all the people. So it's not the homogenous thing, but the large extent. Yes, they have internalized them. I'm into in ways that prevents them from seeing the larger picture. I mean, you just look at the job they're doing. They are the largest because they are the ones with a passport, because they believe in the of logistics, but they only get to see a small part of the whole picture.

They are essentially the supply chain, which is an entire economy, but they will never get to see a small part of it, which is more useful to other than that, there are so many structural forces preventing them from seeing the larger picture is you in fact, you mentioned this at this thing, and I was struck by the full quote, which is in your book, where this person say to you said this, we just the truck driver to check this.

We just had your transporter's hum. Jesse John lyrical about has struggled with seems to be very sort of a perceptive way of seeing yourself at the bottom of the food chain. And the guy above you, you know that he's treating you like a pal to John, but he's just wandering above you. And you also kind of know that it seems interesting. And what also sort of struck me as you spoke about how the status of truck drivers is actually diminished over the decades.

Like, you know, you have this bit way. You're speaking about, you know, how a truck driver friend of yours is telling you about the notoriety truck drivers enjoy in society. And you write, quote, It does me it wasn't always like this. In the 80s when his father started driving trucks, the status of truckers was very different from what it is now without power steering. Driving trucks was considered a relatively skilled, well-paid job, much like train and forklift operator in small villages, largely cut off from the world, would welcome them as a hard bingo's of goods and news, treat them to to even invite them into their homes.

Dr.. About a month later and here you could get that guy Stockwood. And this also drives home how enormous the changes of the last couple of decades are, not just in this context, because you talk of a villagers cut off from the world would look at getting the news from truckers. And now the villagers have smartphones and many ways of getting the news and they don't need truckers anymore. And at the same time, trucking has lost some of the skill because power steering and all these other things have come into it.

And at the same time, truckers, in a sense, are, you know, much more cut off from the world than these sort of religious does become an issue with something that the older truckers deal with, because the older truckers might have gotten into the game at a time where it wasn't such a lowly profession, so to say, or to satisfy this out. And now you're a nobody and you're nothing like you spoke about one trucker who, you know, did a vehicle and wanted to do management and his father would not let him put him in the truck business and is cursing his father that what kind of a father would do that to his son?

Is it a difference in approach and attitude between the older guys, the middle aged guys, the middle aged guys are my age and maybe the younger kids of your age.

So among the older guys I have ask them. I mean, what I should ask them was, what do you think? You're so experienced, so many years of experience on the road doesn't mean anything to the people who are hiring you. And that is where the problem lies, because the sort of experience at the heart of any value in that, what they're ordering, whether I'm also the investment, is they want someone to work longer hours, eat less and manage with less sleep.

So there's an immense sense of frustration that I have for all my life and jawbreakers more avenues to go up you once you start as a truck driver, it's more clear you will get an improvement or there will be any sort of change in your designation of that. Sense of frustration was immense, especially in the military, was see that after all you lost, all the savings are negligible. The children are also not as educated as they would have liked them to be.

Many of them ended up joining them and not the younger ones. They were more and more hustlers. I would say they were just the attitude of the same in the sense that I am trying this out for now. But my more on to something else. So one of the problems with my marriage was, do you think this has sort of getting the job of driving trucks as practice for his driving test to become a bus driver? So they have other ambitions.

They have a little bit more than other avenues of that one. And they are also keenly aware of the lack of a nobody in society are likely to be looked down and judged as an exporter, then maybe develop and of them constantly looking out for other items. And this is one. Conducted recently by the same Lay Foundation said that eighty five percent of the attackers were not recommend knocking the door their family members on the job. So that's the kind of status that is required in the early days, in the 80s and 90s.

If these were like the proper boom to care for trucking any something else, which I found out from all commercial vehicle production really boomed from the 90s.

And this can be seen also from the small town, the mammoth, where they buried these trucks. The number of people employed by 2017 in the stimulus was a three fold increase in the people employed and making trucks. And I like to think of the 90s as the arrogance of liberalisation. And the fear is that there was a lot of buildup in terms of economic in the field and then more better for the economy to commercial vehicles. And they are the best way possibly to go down how the economy is doing.

So I look at year and what you said about the older truck drivers is also kind of illustrative of, you know, a mistake young people often make an old people want about where you assume that you are making some small decision and it is not a big deal. For example, I will you know, I can't find a job right now. I'll start driving a truck. Let's see how it goes. And before you know it, twenty five years have passed and there's nothing else you can do.

And your whole life has gone by and you're kind of stuck. And like you said, it's not even like a career track that you get in three months and you get promoted from intern all the way to see you. If you're driving a truck, you're driving a truck. You're not a CEO at any point, especially when you know so much of the industry, like you pointed out, is, you know, not corporate. I used it all like you spoke about how I think seventy five percent or three fourths of the trucking in India is by owners who own five trucks or less.

So it's all just a bunch of really small outfits and there aren't structures within which you can raise. I want to go back a little bit to that whole question of sort of cost and divisions that we sort of spoke about. Like one on the whole, you pointed out about how truckers see themselves as, you know, satisfied or the lowest of all costs. But you've also spoken about, you know, when you were traveling through the north, the divisions between Punjabis versus hurricane moves and Jarrad's.

But Punjabis are like they were the original truckers and it was a glamorous life and then these Haryanvi scheme and messed it up. And look at Haryana and how women are treated, which also will come back later. And then later on, when you're in the Northeast, you speak about the tribalism in full view. Right. Good sort of trust. Deficit is palpable in the air here. Men size each other up, really seeking answers to the one question being on their minds.

Who are you? Are you Indian or tribal? Is tribal with tribal. If Nagui Shenango or material Omiya Bengali Muslim. The answer to that question is what determines the nature of further engagement? This breakdown of interpersonal trust means people tend to stick with their own, and this vicious cycle of identity politics and ethnic strife continues indefinitely. Stockholding. This is, of course, not just a problem of the trucking ecosystem, but our society itself of policy. But is this sort of.

In hand, I would imagine, and talking it could go both ways, because you all share that common burden of the loneliness of the long distance trucker, as it were there, that can bring you together despite all the other divisions. But I can also imagine that why this sort of tribalism can be something that you look for, to find comfort zones which you find among people like yourself, and therefore that can get. And so what was your sense of this during your travels?

My sense was that this whole idea of India existed on my own land for the last bunch of you.

And I'm going to ask you, does not trust the people of Utah that I mean, the other extremely local society, that is a lot of our number. Don't think that because we are constantly searching for someone whom I know they have kinship relationships with or some sort of loose regional affiliation. And also part of this trust deficit is just immense. On the large part of the 19th and early 20th century, people would say that you are going to do something, that they could resemble the news that to do it.

And that's the sort of world that exists today. And that's different than the ones who actually have to travel to others, don't need to travel by plane or something like that at all. And certainly in places where they are almost there. And I would say that that only encourages regionalism, that the whole idea plus plus solidarity did not come into any sense of class solidarity that I like to if I was absent. That was none of the animals that I you know, I ignored mostly along the lines of ownership itself.

I mean, what one you going up do if you want to save for the union or you want to negotiate for better wages, will you? Later. You all have to speak the same language, even though you belong to many of the other families. And they couldn't understand how it is that I wasn't expected to. On the one hand, there's, of course, caste, religion, all kinds of things. And this is the main reason why we don't have any sort of political meaning in India.

Then I recently saw Nitish Man, and then I was struck by how powerful a union leader can be. I mean, if that is the sort of potential that exists to bring the country to a standstill, if you have that sort of influence or a constituency like, of course, you can be immensely powerful in the country. And that's what I really want, an Irishman. But that's unimaginable in India.

Bonaly Sarla organization, which claims to represent the complexities, is Ampicillin, Democrats families. That is also an association of owners within boss of their own interests and the interests of their caucus, their employer. So that's how it works in India.

One of the sort of striking anecdotes in your book was when you stop it hubo when you're going up north and making the journey up north and you stop it at Hubo and there's a little kid who's running around taking the orders and you have this trucker taking the kid on his lap and just playing with his genitals openly in front of everybody while everybody's laughing and even the kid is squealing and laughing. And you pointed out how it is sort of a natural thing.

It wasn't out of the ordinary. And you wrote, quote, It's shocking how outrageous liberal even's attitudes towards children in many parts of India seem to have ossified in the media. Villeda Child sexual abuse is terrifyingly normalised. Unlike America, where childhood is disappearing with the advent of mass TV and Internet, it seems the concept of childhood never really gained the most currency in the first place. And it struck me that you also elaborated on how this sort of sanctity of childhood is this thing that is separate from adulthood as something that carries with it so much innocence.

And then gradually you come of age and all of that. And all of that is a luxury that is only really dead, even conceptually for elites like us and for much of India, it's not the case for much of India will be people relate to kids isn't a very instrumental way. In earlier centuries, it was common to think of children only as a resource, if you would, in a time of famine, you would send your kid. And that's one of the things that you commented on happening here.

So it's not something, you know, sort of repeatedly while you were going what you like. Was it something that struck those as unusual or that was a normal for them? And is it something that you got used to of the repeated time that this is it's natural for them to. Like this and behave like this, so I mean, across Indian highways, all of us will employ these child, the three of them, and they will have people running around collecting water and delivering stuff.

So I'll definitely have to get used to it because there was no option in this is all I could do this. So for me, if you look the 10 million daily at this point, and that is a staggering and in of the right to education makes it compulsory and also free, that is still this immense resistance right now because of various socio economic reasons, poverty, all these reasons that is the resistance to enroll people in school. I know that.

Also, did I ever feel a deep way of looking at the statistics of these entities for the middle class? Because it would be scandalous to suggest that they don't think of their children as being, but largely their blame to the government itself is sort of changing the laws to recognize this reality. I mean, right now, children under the age of 14 are allowed to work and family operates on an hourly after school. You can walk in the family business, which is it's going can be anything from really making a lot of walking and looking down the store.

That means so from taxpayer children as this economically. So that attitude is there. And if we were forced to even amend the party to recognize that fact, it is a lot. But I would say it's a very difficult thing to really get rid of this attitude, because as long as the economic compulsions like you always say, enjoy the incentives and the long awaited report on compliance. And so it's very unlikely that the secretary will succeed.

Yeah, and I'm reminded of these, you know, the child armies of West Africa, where you have militias made up of these 10 year olds and 11 year olds responding to a completely different kind of incentive, which also sort of tells you how our modern notion of children is so relatively recent. I can also see why many of us sort of what the middle class would think of as the great unwashed, to use your face from earlier in this broadcast, would be so distrustful of government because, for example, we speak of the Right to Education Act.

But that is, of course, a joke which does nothing for children and if anything, made things harder for them. And similarly, I think one of the things that I'm sure these guys intuitively get is that laws don't do anything, that the lived reality is something completely different. And I written about this many years ago, all of us are sort of distressed by child labor. But there was an old Oxfam study on the situation in Bangladesh where, you know, the factories which are child workers, and there was international outrage about that.

And about 30000 child workers were laid off and many of the kids who were laid off actually didn't starve to death. You know, many of the girls became prostitutes. Similarly, there was a nineteen ninety five study by UNICEF which showed that, you know, a bunch of well-meaning people began a boycott of carpets made in Nepal using child labor. And because of that, about 5000 to 7000 Nepalese goes into prostitution because what was otherwise a better option, working in a carpet factory was donated.

And so be a little something that had an easy option is that you get the state to legislate and to make a law and that these people will stop treating their kids badly. But the realities behind why all these things happen is something sort of completely different and far more disturbing. Moving on from it also. You also commented at one point on the absence of women in the landscapes that you describe. Like at one point you wrote, quote, The first thing that strikes one about the highways of India and Rajasthan in particular is a creepy wholesale absence of women, not a single sighting of the female form for miles and miles.

To the extent that when you finally see one idling by the road, you tend to assume she's a sex worker. And later on, of course, you point out the exception to this, which is when you go to Nagaland and you know, that's a little bit different. But otherwise, in the roads of India, you don't see women on the highways at all. How does this sort of affect the way that truckers look at into gender relationships?

Are women merely sort of instrument? For them that when they can get hold of one, they want, you know, six, which they don't otherwise get so much, how does all of that sort of feature in the mental landscapes?

I will say this is a modest proposal. So much so many of them lives in style. They have interacted with the many, the instrumental in my. I mean, it would be as little as a normal school. That's the extent of the interaction with them. And that is the law and order to maintain a standard as far as interacting with the opposite sex. There are so many social forces that sort of come together to inculcate this attitude. And I would say, given the amount of force that is this, in some ways I would say they're going to get the men out of the exotic room to get an object of sex.

But someone is so far removed from their world and will never, ever enter the world, except that the life of the long suffering life or adult prostitute with whom you have a higher volume. But that is the extent of the view of all women. And I would say you so many of the men, I would start in similar ways that give you that level of unemployment. In fact, this whole idea of a masculine world, I mean, I have written many of these masculine spaces in this masculine world, but that all my experience in the world was something that I never did.

After this one. I wanted to see what it was like not involved in this. As I considered Imo's, I would say know.

And that's kind of fascinating. And all the students listening to this, so possibly would be nodding their head in agreement that it's exactly like that. And that sort of leads me to wondering that how quick are we to judge other people like it would be say to see? I think, therefore, that most Indian men are misogynistic and sexist and in that kind of approach to the world and at different levels, they have hatred and a lack of empathy for the other, whoever the other might be in their definition.

And you then have to wonder, how much of this do you actually ascribe to someone being a bad person or C? Because if this is a world that you've grown up in and this is all that you know and you don't know any other way of looking at someone differently, you may have never experienced the joy of that kind of conversation or that kind of companionship that would come with falling in love with someone and then building a life together or whatever.

And it just seems to me that it is so easy for many of us who are much more fortunate and have more exposure to kind of sit in judgment over them, whether they are Taco's or from IAP. What is the I think people and I have less of an excuse to be a sexist, quite honestly. So what's your feeling on this?

I would say that is one one that because even today, 95 percent of marriages are lot like you, more since have looking into them.

But somehow I wonder, you know, whether you are going to be by your parents, I going to lose your life for you. And that is is my question. Or whether it was my daughter being smart that you are not optional. There is more debate on that question of the post fact a little further in every relationship we have with the other six.

It's very interesting having any relationship because you can't really marry a woman, apparently choose one for you. And what what basis is that on which then? It's also my suspicion in the sense that if you are talking with strange women and the constraints that are there on the women, I don't want to pretend. I can't imagine the level of inclusion of that we often find themselves in across the lower zones in. And so. I would say, yes, I feel bad for men, I mean, it's like you said, a combination of various forces have conspired to you know, there are a lot that I could do.

But like you said, it's more than it's their responsibility to work on the victims. I mean, many of them do or they use force to break this prevailing sensitivity towards women.

And it's everyone from the government policy that people in that sort of bombardment I think can be effective to some of you, although I feel that even today, a lot of that bombardment is about empowering women almost.

It's a paternalistic and condescending attitude towards it. And you almost you know that you should worship women because they are your mother or your wife always, you know, sitting them in relation to men and which doesn't go that much further towards sort of respecting the autonomy. And this reminds me of something interesting this Poonam said to me when she was on my show, I think over two years ago. And she does, of course, written this great book called Rima's about young Indians.

And she pointed out that how in many of the small towns of India, young men are increasingly bewildered because young women are more assertive about what they want and so on and so forth. And the men don't have any clue of how to deal with it because there is nothing in the culture that teaches you what to do in such situations. I mean, we think of education as in a narrow sense, escaping from your school or college. But really education comes at you from your culture, including something like Bollywood, where viewing a woman is basically always stalking a woman.

Right. So you have absolutely no way of sort of figuring out what is a normal relationship. And that struck me as interesting aspect of it. And, you know, I spent a bunch of my experience of reading the book kind of slowing down and trying to think about what is the interior life of a trucker. What is it like? Like, OK, we can talk about all of these attitudes maybe toward children and towards women. We can talk about the loneliness you have described in great detail or different points of things that they do within their talking, within the ecosystem of their own.

Little talk with somebody might be a lot of music and they'll be different things going on. And what I also started realizing through the book is that they also build up their own sort of mythologies as we do all you know, they have all the cool stories. It was a fascinating story about a truck driver who got married to a beauty, as you put it. That and I'm just going to relate that to my listeners because it's such a great story.

And it tells you what an India actually has a hold of great folktales around these subjects, which most of us aren't even aware of. But the story basically was it was going on the road. And there is this, of course, to basically a young woman who hitchhikes for the ride and he gives her a lift and then he falls in love with her and he marries and they are living a happy life together. And then one day his Australian that listen, we never see her outside the house.

She never leaves the rubbish outside or whatever. We just don't see her at all. So he's like, what is a mystery? How does no one else ever spot this woman? So one day he goes inside his house when he's supposed to be at work and he sees that he sees a bunch of disconnected bones in the kitchen cooking something, and she immediately realizes what has happened. And she goes into his arms and she says, I only deceived you because you love me so much, but now goodbye.

And she disappears or something. I'm sorry if that's a digression, but I just found it. Such a lovely and almost moving story. A truck driver in love with the coast. And similarly, these there are these other sort of urban legends which they believe in. Like you spoke about, our truck drivers are talking about highway robberies and they point out that in one particular place, these people not only overtake you, make you stop and they rob you, but then they also operate on you and take your kidneys.

And that's basically it. It sounds incredibly implausible, but kind of fascinating. Tell me a little bit about these imperial mythologies, because we all need stories to keep us alive. And relatively fortunately, people like you and me will have our own set of stories that keep us alive, that this is what the politics of today is exposed is why that is the geopolitics. This is what is happening there. But they're sort of internal worlds which are formed by entirely different narratives and stories.

Tell me what kind of sense you got of that word on your travels. Those stories definitely lend themselves very well to stories because on the one point, five black people died in an accident, most of them probably looking forward to a long life. So then it's into the unflinching souls who can then stop dying, is looking for someone they been wanting vengeance or whatever was done. Then somebody was an orphan and wanted to do that. So all of these things come together.

I know that. I know who lost a story every other day. And at some point in this part of this point, they're just going to be on the market. Are you off at a particular time? So that was why on to this time. At the same time as as robbery is concerned, I mean, many of them have faced these sorts of situations, you can't let them work on your life and not at all.

So huge part of the debate on some essentially, essentially, is the British and actually so many of these nomadic tribes who are used to essentially be wandering entertainers or all kinds of nomadic bastard, and they were forced to settle. They were branded as criminal agents on many of them, the idea of surviving. So this has been going on for a long time. And I know those who have that video so that they go out more often. And I did all those things on the Philippine nuffin or something means they are quite lost in that apartment and nothing they can do.

If that happened on other interesting observation about the gunman or something or religion was what the media stampers, they go on and on a Sunday visitor, that they go to the immense uncertainty that their job has got to do that at some level on the supernatural to some level of certainty. So they do not want to know what to do and find so many books there. And at the same time, they have a lot more than they bring every will have of a human set of laws and so many millions of undocumented immigrants.

That's what it is. It's not like another that all of this is meant to ensure their safety is immensely insecure, not just losing your life that you probably all know. Then you're going to do it for like a day or so. Many things have been missing from the political reality. Is that rampant in all places in India?

So essentially, this whole concept of jugada is like the fear of extinction, except really all these amazing, ingenious means. And so they have to constantly be on the water for these teams that are the sort of things that we occupy find in many ways, you know, losing your life. And these stories that come up that reflect many of these insecurity is one of the fascinating stories I got from your book was regarding these cities, the risk of truck drivers in particular.

They do it and they have a picture of a baby in the truck whose face is rather scarred. And when they catch you looking at the photograph, they tell you the origin story, which struck me as a fantastic origin story, which is that the bubble look normal. But then one day this woman with the scarred face went to him and said, baby, please help me. No one will marry me because of my scarred face. So he transferred his scars onto himself, which is just such a remarkable story.

You mention how big a role religion plays in the lives for obvious reasons, as a source of hope and all that. And religion, of course, was famously once called the opium of the masses. And actual opium also plays a part in the lives like. Tell me a bit about the role of alcohol and drugs in in the trucking life, because, you know, one would imagine that when you live a life of such solitude and loneliness on the road all the time, not getting enough sleep and so on.

What do you do for relief? Does alcohol use drugs? You describe in your book about the connection between alcohol and sex, of course, that sometimes when the, you know, prostitution rackets will often run along the bushes, that will shine a light at night and they'll know they have to stop there and sometimes they'll get robbed, but sometimes they'll actually be a sex worker there. And the pimp will also have some doudou with him because they often need alcohol to sort of get all the parts working, as it were.

What's the role of that alcohol and drugs sort of play in the lives of these people? So I'll take it one by one.

Let's start with the alcohol, for instance. I will I would say a lot of its usage is exaggerated in the minds of the ordinary population. With regard to the majority of the families I met told me that they knew if they put their life at risk and that drinking and driving is dangerous. So there was that awareness, but with one exception. So I must have interacted with hundreds of truckers and. With around 30 to 50 of them, and nowhere did I see any consumption while on the road.

So that is an unfair stereotype, which I would like to clarify for your listeners and with regard to opium. It is. Used in certain parts of the country like Punjab and the largest parts of Havana. And it's interesting that India actually is one of the few countries which is legally allowed to cultivate opium for medicinal purposes. All these extracts, codeine is going to cough syrup in order to die from opium that is illegally cultivated in parts of Pakistan, Monteverdi's.

And so it is from these areas that the largest poppy husk is sort of which is actually legal in many parts of the country. Not this time. For example, you have government papers with senators and many drunk drivers patronise these papers. So in these parts, there is quite a dependence on opium, especially in Punjab. I mean, at least anecdotally, the major drug dealers, what percentage of drug dealers? We think they will be a man.

It was unanimously all on seventy five percent. So in Punjab, the sort of opium addiction you see is quite high compared to the rest of the country. One of the truck drivers, it was a quite heavy user of the book and he ordered a letter saying that I this book makes me scratch myself and will give a to deal with alcohol no longer with them. And that helps me stay awake and keep all these. So that was how he rationalized the following.

Kind of interesting.

But at the same time, it is extremely addictive of the withdrawal symptoms, of the deadly diarrhea. And he himself admitted himself twice to a national figure and he couldn't beat the habit in spite of his attempts. So it's really dangerous, sort of a drug which might seem its effects are quite mild, but the long term effects on your body is very striking. I mean, the face becomes formed. I know your body sort of shrivelled away. And it's quite easy to make out someone who is dependent on opium.

You once you get an eye for their children. Yeah.

And it's interesting how sort of having drugs, of course, in the news these days and sitting in Mumbai, we shouldn't possibly not comment too much. But no, it is interesting how a lot of things which could be considered contraband or, you know, sort of in the narcotics family are actually normalised parts of our cultures. And that's fine, like Pong, for example, or, you know, in the health Bengali. So a vegetable I grew up eating was supposed to antipasto and also is made with poppy seeds and so on.

And, you know, there are different levels of damage that they can do to the person. I mean, I don't think any Bengali would say that whatsoever did them any harm. And if you speak of being addicted to Bengali food, it's an entirely harmless sort of sense. In your book, of course, you pointed out the traditions of this, but some of it is just recreational new use in school and it's not a big deal. But some of the sort of the Hado forms of the drug can really damage people.

And how is it looked upon in the culture? Like, is it a realisation among Karkus that there is a red line and, you know, those who cross it just can't help it? I mean, it's like addiction. I mean, what do you do? You go a little too far down that road and then you're sort of stuck or, you know, a lot of the milder forms like Bookit, for example, are not treated as a drug at all.

I mean, it's just something that you have like one Padalka, whatever. Yes, you're right. I mean, there is an acknowledgement of Nightline among many crocodiles, for example, one of the doctors I traveled with, his younger brother, had died due to addiction to the heart of what we just wanted to find up. So they very well know that these particular forms, which are often sedentary in nature and recent introductions to the landscape and cookies, has been taken since centuries and opened up on a farm and used to use it to allow you to organize politically as a way to keep up this period of years.

So there is definitely the acceptance. But I mean, often what happens is that the policy is because these habits from the start, if and then once you're you're biologically addicted to it, then it is in spite of your best efforts, it is very difficult to come out of that happened. And since your lifestyle also kind of encourages the consumption, I mean, it's not like I need to break the monopoly. And this is a sort of crutch you come to rely upon who somehow survived these grueling conditions.

And that's what happens with many. But there is that line in their mind for sure.

You know, an interesting observation you made in your book, which I keep making all the time. So when I started to become like it was another come to my arms kind of moment, which is when you speak about India inhabiting discontinuities simultaneously, which, you know, I had always meant in a sense of social attitudes that we are in the 1928 and 21st century, especially if you see the way women are treated to that. I would say we haven't even heard the first century, 19th and 20th, except in some select pockets.

But, you know, it struck me that that line also that distinction also holds. And I'm just thinking aloud as we're speaking about the subject that it also holds in terms of what kind of substances you use in the culture and what the sciences. For example, there are many substances we use today. For example, coffee in a manner of speaking know, it could be said that I'm addicted to coffee and coffee is actually more addictive than many of the softer drugs that are actually banned.

And some some would argue it's more harmful as well. And also what I sometimes do do I haven't taken it today, but what I often take before recordings overall ability to focus is cognitive drug called modafinil. India is one of the few places where it's actually legal over the counter. So it's called modulo 200, not named after the prime minister. And I find it's sort of remarkable. I know a lot of people who also take it, though.

I would advise listeners not just because I do, but I just find that it is, you know, while coffee is a blunt tool, it's a sharp tool or just keeps me really focused and mentally fresh, even when I'm physically very tired, the one should take it early in the morning. If you take it in the evening, you're not going to sleep for the whole night, definitely. So it's kind of interesting. On the one hand, you have science going in one way where we are getting revelations about the efficacy and the danger and the addictiveness of the drugs.

And on the other hand, you have laws which are kind of behind the science where, you know, maybe they're a few decades behind the science and not really caught up with the science entirely. And then there is culture which is on its own long, slow continuum, where, you know, people have what they have. And that's also completely sort of distant from all of these. And as I'm thinking aloud, I'll ask you to join me in thinking aloud, even apart from this context, can you sort of you know, what are the different kinds of things that come to your mind where you talk about the different centuries that India inhabits, not just sort of in this context, but, you know, because one could say that you actually took an effort to step out of your sort of elite, educated middle class bubble and sort of go around.

So, you know, any observations on this?

You know, one constituency in India which really comes to mind when you talk about this on the nomadic tribes of India, they constitute around five to 10 groups of our population. But so many of them have not even been there, not on the electoral rolls, many of them don't have any identity document. So they are essentially invisible as citizens of our country. And because they're not even on the electoral rolls, there is no sort of concerted effort to raise the standards of living on some targeted schemes or to Philadelphia.

I mean, there are but they're not as focused because they're more formal or political constituency. So on many of these types, they live a lifestyle that is essentially unchanged from centuries. So, for example, I met the turnbuckle while I was travelling in Kashmir and their lifestyle, I mean, they considered worth around 15 or 20 per cent of Australia's population altogether. And they thought they practice the right of transhumanist because I think they're taking their flocks up the alpine pastures and then during the summer and then the winter to come down again.

So their entire livelihood is derived from the wool and the dairy products and so on. So this is just one example of whom I happen to encounter. But across India in my lifetime, for example, we have the jungles of India, has a huge livestock population and we are the ones who are raising them. Many of them belong to these nomadic tribes who are wandering across the landscape, especially when you will find many of these tribes. So I work I work into really, really giving.

And if you really come to think of it, I mean, they will have the mobile phone of collecting mobile phone has become a proxy for modernity in on my way. Someone has a mobile phone and in the modern world. But I wonder if that is really a fair statement to make because all other aspects of your life, all the other comforts which we take for granted and even the way you're living your life, you're pitching tents in the middle of nowhere.

You are constantly moving. This is unchanged for so many years. So, I mean, this is one example that comes to my mind when you say that in an average multiple centuries.

Yeah. And it's interesting you talk about how, you know, when that the seasonal migration of the years is happening and you're on your way to Kashmir at that time on that leg of the trip. And they're all hitchhiking by the side of the road trying to grab a lift. And at that point, it struck me that, you know, for these days, a truck is almost like a time machine of sorts that are the ways they're sort of working with their livestock were just for a moment.

They use the 20th century to get a little quicker. And like you said, you know, some of them, if they have mobile phones, they also have a slice of the 21st century in their farms. But it's just a gadget. I mean, you know, what do you do with it? I mean, with various sort of the rest of the 21st century. So to sit going forward, that's that's yeah. That's a lot of food for thought.

And therefore, we should take a commercial break and think about it.

Are you one of those people who not only loves to read but also wants to write better? If so, I have something for you. Since April this year, I've been teaching an online course called The Art of Making Food. Webinars spread out over four Saturdays in which I shared whatever I've learned about the craft and practice of writing over 25 years as a professional writer. The course also contains many writing exercises, discussions on email and WhatsApp and much interactivity.

It goes through ten thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. You can check out the details at India. Uncute dot com slash clear writing. This link will be in the señores. If you want to bridge the gap between the thoughts in your head and the words on the page, then the art of clear writing might be just what you need. October Batuz begin on Saturday, October 3rd. So hurry and register before then. India uncute dot com slash clear writing.

Welcome back to the CNN in The Unseen, I'm chatting with the digital baker, author of the delightful book Tour de India. And, you know, I have to say that for those who are listening, I had mentioned at the start of the show that we started an hour late because of technical glitches before further technical glitches actually made us stop the recording and resume two days later. So right after the question about alcohol and drugs, we had a problem which made us sort of go offline.

And now three days later, in fact, the first half was recorded on Monday. And we are back on Thursday. And we finished it on taking a break. And we're here again. And this is sort of the first time it's happened to me. What I thought it's because this is kind of both the life of Draco's would be like, which is the subject of Regitze book, interminable delays and so on, and also rejected joining the civil services.

So maybe this is up for that reason as well. So one part of the book, which is sort of interesting, silent, but is nothing, by the way, I can see on some one part of the book, which really is sort of interested me and I just was also about where you talk about how over time that we've already spoken about how they sort of have a distinctive cultural based on how they develop and use of their own. And part of the book, which I really enjoyed, was about how they develop their own vocabulary with their own aphorisms and sayings and all that.

For example, one example of that, which, of course, is much Boudicca, Mahatma Gandhi. And then within the book, there were these sort of delightful little throwaway lines, like I laid out a couple of them, which I really like this one, which cautions the drivers to drive carefully. And the line is good to look bad. But about these, they Haridwar to do good. And then there's another one which seems sort of almost a sad acceptance of the lot with this code, a middle keys in the biscuit or a driver of keys and the steering wheel brakes to stop.

And there's another one where they are sort of reflecting on marriage, which is a feature which job will get bad when a particular drivers through an operator. Good. And these are both their humorous, reflective, they're even self-deprecating. You must be familiar with a lot of this stuff. What was your sense of sort of navigating the lingo and what kind of sense did it give you? Again, to go back to the subject we discussed earlier of their interior lives, like, do some of these become issues or tropes that come up again and again and again?

Is it often in terms of language and this is a broader reflection than just beyond the trucking life, that sometimes in such lingo and such vocabulary and such tropes awful sort of the comfort of familiarity to people who might crave that.

So I mean, these sort of aphorisms that came up again and again through my journey, I know many of these are passed down from you start to collapse. I mean, it's part of the initiation into the world of trucking and into the wild. Off the highway was the highway. As for them, it was this unknown beast. They have to constantly negotiated, keeps throwing up these challenges for them, which they have to overcome time and again, so that for them to also serve as a tutorial in some ways to learn how to navigate the at the same time, it is also a way to look at their own lives, which are more the lifestyle is extremely grueling.

So they seek consolation in these aphorisms. And then, of course, in the South, there must be different versions of these, which I would not really appreciate. But in this time, one of these aphorisms I have developed over the years and the young classes are especially fond of recounting them when you ask them. So that is how I learned about them from the classes, mainly those starts in the middle of nowhere at all. If they are the ones who are a little bit more reserved, usually the classes loved to talk to their young chaps.

I mean, there are hardly twenty, twenty one and they quite open about whatever they've learned so far.

And it's sort of a difference between the way the classes and the sods approach you. And also, is it a difference in the way that they approach life like this book before the break about how, you know, the two sides? It is almost a sense of poignancy because the status of the truck driver has become more slowly over the course of the thirty years. And they would also be the sense of hopelessness where the release date is a dead end street.

Other classes also like that, or other classes more sort of ambitious and looking beyond trucking and so on. What was your experience?

That other tend to be more generally, they are more jaded about life, that the best part of their lives is behind them and there's nothing as such they have to look. Driving the truck are the classes they are just taking in society. They're traveling abroad and they're learning new stuff for a couple of years. They're just traveling. So they are on a learning curve, if you could put it that way. So they are more hopeful. There was also much wider number one coliseum in Maryland.

We used to listen to the HONNA, Justin Bieber and all these folks were quite influenced by American culture. So you can see the difference. I mean, this guy was probably a couple of years down the line and take up something else because he had access to the English language to some degree is what you do with much, much wider than that of other celebrities. Yeah, and it's interesting.

His world view would be wider than it was charged with driving a truck. But at the same time as well, we would be better than wherever he's coming from because he's traveled all around. So in a sense, he's transcending both of those critics of. There's another interesting thing that you pointed out in the book, and we shouldn't actually take me by surprise at all, is the enormous warmth and generosity with which you are treated like you've spoken about how at different times it would not allow you to pay for anything.

In one case, after you started the journey, they actually drove into this harbor, which you immediately knew was much more upscale than they would otherwise go to. And they ordered a lavish meal with two phony dishes and a lot of it on the road and all that. And they insisted on paying for it and set you up to accommodate money, even though they are spending many times. It is normal allowance for food on that. And how did you know where that comes from?

Because, you know, there is this I often feel that we in the middle class and we elites are sort of, you know, much less generous and much less open in that sense than the people, you know, the middle class would refer to as the great unwashed, as you put it earlier in your episode. I don't mean to imply that either you or I listen to them like that. Like I remember when I first went to Pakistan to cover the cricket during 2006 and I was covering the tour for The Guardian and looking for and the first time we were in Lahore, we needed to buy some saltines for Riccardo's and all that.

And two or three of us went to a store and we bought a whole bunch of supplies. And then we asked for the bill and we were chit chatting. And at one point we mentioned we are from India. We've come to cover, too. Everything changes, you know, until then, it's all transactional. And, you know, whatever the moment we send in from India, I just want to just overflows and refuse to take money. And I know that's a cliche that they refuse to sort of take money from you.

But the experiences that with one minor exception of a small incident, something we sort of experience this everywhere we went, you know, the the generosity of the common person to what someone who does not need to be generous to someone who is probably, you know, much better off than him. And as you said, your experience is this memoir about the of the truck or towards someone who's much better off, who's come from another world and is going to go back to that one soon.

What did you make of that? Was it as ubiquitous as the sense that I got from the book? And how did it kind of make you feel?

And did you then get conscious about not exploiting it, about taking a step back and sort of not, you know, all of that about the middle class or the attitudes are definitely different in terms of how you look at money, how you look at strangers. So what I saw was the attitude was that if I had gone mad, know, the money keeps coming and going. I know they often refer to themselves also as the leader, as someone who is not interested in any of it.

So that is the sort of mythology that some of them have constructed around their lifestyle and not sort of the NRP, I think is tied up with that particular self consumption among the middle class. I would say there is relatively less openness and animosity in my experience. And if it is generosity often in the world of charity, I mean, it's there's a conscience, the tendency to look at the NATO strategy as something that accrues measured and there is a certain selfish intent behind it.

Thumbs up for you. Get something in the next life or you will be people.

No, working with these particular concerns are there among the unselfconscious. If your generosity I found was something I do not expect to find to explain how it made me feel, it made me extremely conscious.

Many times I refused to. I mean, we have to step down when such things happen. And it happened all the time in the South, I felt things were a bit more transactional and on the back of the. Because that whole concept of the lifestyle, I mean, what I thought was that in the South, it was more of a livelihood rather than a lifestyle. So in the north, so we actually considered it as. But this is my style and this is how we do things.

The South. The truck is more of a asset which is meant to be monetized. And so, for example, the one he was used to take on hitchhikers like anything like there were 10 people sitting in the same truck at the end of the cabin or a couple of them with their backs to the winches. There were ice sacks and it was full. That's how we wanted an extra buck. I mean, I admired it. Entrepreneurs. I mean, it might be illegal to 50 people in the world is trying to make some money out of it.

And how much does the job really make the fatalities? So that's the spirit I admired in the north. I didn't find this hitchhiking seemed to be accepting. You knew he was insane. I mean, I didn't write about it in the book, but I typed from our to book and I was standing by the side of the road with my bag and I was just holding looking around. And I see in five minutes, then around six or seven people around Army Base, they've seen that.

Look at this guy. Apparently you out to find whatever vehicle. They didn't even know I was going in a truck. And finally when it stopped, I see that there are already two or three people inside and only six people let me out a little bit. So the sort of overpopulation there is and it would be means that more buses and trains, even trucks, are overcrowded. I mean, Singler dolphins are caught and which was already filled with people also.

I didn't know nowhere else did I find that happening. So that was quite interesting. Yeah.

And it's also also sort of interesting. I mean, I'm just wondering now you spoke about how truck drivers see themselves as the law. And and to some extent, I'm wondering if that also comes from the self-image that they build around themselves, that someone in the South will build a different kind of self-image better. It's a livelihood and is doing it for that reason. And that's, you know, and we someone in the north, like you said, will consider it part of their lifestyle or who they are, and especially the way the Punjabi sees himself as being the law and being so exquisite.

My noisy and all of that. You know, there's also a section where you speak about Sikhs in trucking where you write, quote, Interestingly, in North America, as in India, the Sikhs have become a dominant presence in trucking. I wonder if the long tryst with migration has something to do with why Punjabi stricter driving trucks with such enthusiasm? Because what is striking for the form of constant displacement and that gives a sense that for many Punjabi is just trucking and getting on there is a much more natural than it is for people, perhaps elsewhere, because so many of them do it.

And then that just creates a cycle where there is a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. One really can't comment or depends on the circumstances. Trucking might be the best thing they have available to them. So it might even be a virtuous cycle. And apart from that, just the sort of the lifestyle connotations, sort of all of that. The other sort of part of your book, which I found quite fascinating, was the relationship between the truck and the truck, which is very different from the relationship between anyone else who drives the vehicle and is where like I would not feel for my car to be of all truckers would feel about the trucks.

And you spent a bunch of time in this place considering would they actually build trucks? Tell me a little bit about what is that relationship between the truck and the truck.

So I just to speak all the Punjabis before they get through this. And so they're the history of Punjab is quite tied up with that of trucking in India after partition, many Sikhs and countries from West Pakistan who were resettled in these refugee colonies, many of them spread out from there and they started driving trucks. And this was also tied up with the World War Two, which are standard. And many military issued trucks had ended up in India at that time.

And these were then refashioned by the new owners and personalised in some ways. And that is the good. And often what happens is that whenever Punjabis go driving trucks, some entrepreneurial set up a Punjabi novels. This is also the reason why Fanelli food has become the sort of pan Indian food. And then we see Indian food. It's often Punjabi, McGlade, that sort of thing. And there is a link with close link. We're talking over the lives that I know as far as the question.

Goes on, this whole personalization is linked to the emergence of centers like Citizen, because I speak a little about why Indian trucks and ducks in the subcontinent are so colorful. What is the outlook?

Why is this so specific to those appointment until it is linked to the history of horse transport in India across history? They are being sold in communities like the bananas and so on who were tasked with sporting goods, and their tradition was to decorate their animals. So the camels, their hair would be paraded, the bullock carts would be put into the bullocks themselves with tassels hanging around their ears. And these are the same tassels which we see it hanging around.

And we also even see someone take started dating back to the Intocable century about how a ship was decorated or during that day. We don't find too many references to this sort of thing. But I found one of all the motifs from the people to the Eagles. I mean, everything was a I mean, so many of these things you can find and then they'll into the text on how to be in the ship and all these more things are getting into the car today.

So I found it incredibly fascinating. I mean, this is not just some modern phenomenon to its history has not been adequately documented and it's not possible to document it as much because of its informal nature. But it has a long history. In Pakistan, for example, there has been a bit more documentation of art because there is much more intricate and it's much more colorful. You're insane. I mean, you must have seen them anywhere in the world.

So there you see some historical accounts of how or when the artisans of princely states in this town in Gujarat, many of them Muslims, migrated to Karachi after partition. And there they started to ask for their skills. And that's how these sort of motifs came up in Pakistan. In India, unfortunately, we don't have someone to report it. And it was definitely a fascinating place to be. And I love what that showed me was how much did the books in decorating his way to say to the proprietor of that particular establishment, for me, it's like choosing a life partner.

So it's a lot of thought needs to be put into how you won the they've been. So you want to be clear and will like eight out of 12 months of your life there, probably more. So it is a much more if your home and you should not be any compromises on that. So the Punjab and the Kashmiri, especially those who invest a lot and I visited all along to LAX in just decorating their to do a lot. So yes, I do see the Lord about the relationship between the truck and proposal.

Often they refer to the truck itself as a sheep or as a woman, but I already clearly a media initiative. So all these references come up and that is the personification of the truck. It's given some human qualities and ultimately it must be all I mean, investing lot this amount of money and time for this day, for one month in that establishment until the whole truck is made. All the design is done one day just to supervise the rebuilding of the truck.

That is the amount of emotion and get the work. And I don't think you will find that anywhere else in the world apart from the Indian support.

One of the key in your book, and that change the way we look at trucks forever is that when a manufacturer sends a truck to a truck, he's basically selling the chassis. Right. And and the rest of it, the body of the truck is something that is built and customized. And like you pointed out, there are some places like South India, I think you pointed out, where it's very functional and they don't really care so much. But up north, the facilities and the Punjabis and different cultures will still have the top down up just the way they want.

Like you quoted me by saying who runs the establishment in India saying that this is like sort of buying a home and choosing a life partner would also make buying a home where you want every aspect of it sort of personalized and customized. Exactly as you want. All of it. Hidden compartments, so what to do with it in compartments so hidden compartments are often used to hide contraband, like, for example, one part of it that can be used to hide a book in order for his personal consumption.

I'm sure there's a lot of smuggling also that happens in India.

Synergy happens and a lot of this is facilitated through these hidden compartments and so on because they're useful. I mean, when the spirit is often out there to save money on media, anything you need to hire, which is very likely, will have these hidden compartments come in handy.

But I also hope the proselyte and get into the process of building their krakatit. So from the Tassi that I don't own, see 10 to 15 different types of artisans who are actively trying to. Sort of the skeletal framework, first around the JASSI and then you will have the radium, the electrician, the paint, the cave and the weight, or the artisan will get the job done and in all these different shapes.

So it's a very specialized job.

And often in panel, for example, I saw literally all of these artisans were from the yard and then sit in the place I visited. All of them were from one district. It doesn't matter when it is picked up, which has a rich heritage of folk art, no matter how many paintings are quite famous. So this is the traditional skill in that region. And many of them come to Punjab to work in these establishments. And I stayed there for a couple of days and it was a revelation and it was a lot of fun just talking to these types of artist, of trying to see how he how he has learned these things.

And then also we find that almost that much of an Indian actually runs on these informal apprenticeship networks, formal training, because it's smart, well, well-established, everything that most Indians have learned. It has been from some dangerous person, you know, a relative or someone you know, who will very generously impart his skills so that you can pick it up. And that was quite interesting.

And I was also, you know, struck by a part of your book where you talk about how, you know, the roads of India itself are changing, like there is an ecosystem out there. And there are all these different moving subcultures, as it were, traveling through these roads. But then at one point when traveling through Gujarat, you made the observation called the highways in Gujarat are so slick. Who were they in the soulless efficiency of the autobahns and freeways of the West Coast and elsewhere?

You know, you have spoken about how different parts of the road you have different Habas catering to different kinds of clientèle, Punjabis and so on. But at the same time, you talk about how some of these firewalls and so on just sort of passing them by. For example, at one point when you stopped to talk about, you say good business for many of these travelers, especially in Gujarat, has been slow earlier. The occupied prime real estate right by the highway where the spree of local construction has bypassed many of them.

Now, cars and trucks just zoom above them, oblivious to their presence. So is it sort of and I know that there are always these trade offs and we can both bemoan the loss of the richness of this cultural diversity in the form of the different types of taboos. And on the other hand, there is an increased efficiency the quicker travel times, which also add to, say, unseen elements to the lives of the truckers and the drivers. What sense did you get of this from the truckers themselves?

Like, is this something that they bemoan? Did you feel that there is some color being lost here, which is, you know, which we don't appreciate and enough? And what were your thoughts?

I would say the effect are largely been positive. Many of us are happy and they can be very conscious.

They can see the fact that rewards have improved so much over the last 10, 15 years, especially the national highways. So as one, to put it to me, that it's become very easy for us, most of the cities that there was a bypass which they made from which we can avoid the city itself. And almost all of the villages have flyovers. So our job is just to drive and then not too many hurdles in our way. And that enables them to do more business because they've done want to reduce it, improve their income overall and generally.

It's a good thing. I would say, of course, there is a lot of resistance to these things. And interestingly, when I visited my native village while on this trip in the on the coast and what I found there was the protests happening by the locals because they are building a flyover which will bypass their main market by the highway. So by the highway and all these shops and stuff where the government is trying to build a flyover which will bypass.

And there is ferocious resistance to this and we will not allow this flyover to improve. So you see the kind of challenges the government also has to overcome to bring this so-called development and this loss of heritage. Except that when all of this comes up right, then all these traditional establishments have been there for decades, find themselves certainly bypassed. So that aspect is there. But I will say it's largely been forward.

Let's move on to I mean, this we're going to talk about Punjab and Kashmir and all of that. Let's let's I found this section on the northeast. Interesting because interesting for the reasons that he told me about a lot more than just a cooking knife, it also gave me a sense of how the Northeast is almost such a unique part of India, if you can call it a part of India. You know, to sort of go back to my trip or focus on my impression through traveling through Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, all these places, that it was just like India, the signs were in order.

But culturally, I never felt away from home. And the one place where I did feel away from home was when I went to Peshawar. And that's until, you know, I travel down the Khyber Pass and there everybody looks different and they're speaking sort of a different language, Pashto instead of Urdu. And they're, you know, the sense was kind of different, not unfriendly, not in that sense, not hostile, but just different. And I thought that, you know, that similar difference and it's very interesting.

So since this is a show that welcomes digression, I think one of my own that, you know, one of the enterprising journalists I was traveling with, he managed to do some jugaad and he got these guys who would take us right to the edge of the Khyber Pass where the border with Afghanistan is. So we could look down in Afghanistan. And that's an area where the army doesn't even allow Pakistanis to go. Right. It's so it's just a restricted area, sort of, so to say.

And we had a couple of Army guys in plainclothes accompanying us and we got in a bit of a food fight with a journalist. And it was a nice trip. And we went right to the edge where we're standing there and looking down into Afghanistan. It was quite awesome. And we were told that if anybody was stopped by one of these, whatever whatever you do, don't say you're from India, which is kind of obvious. So at one point, these guys stopped us and this rolled up with this big gun.

And by the way, guns are ubiquitous. We went to the gun market in Peshawar where you can just, you know, just buy a gun like you're buying oranges. And anyway, so this this army dude with a big gun who stopped us, he just looks me in the face from like seven inches away and says Consejo. And I said Karachi. And he said atcha Pakistan as this Pakistan is another country. Right. As if, you know, India is not the problem.

Pakistan is a foreign country for those guys. And I, of course, thought of that, as many Kashmiris must be looking at indirectly. But apart from that, I got a sense of I've always had a sense of the Northeast, a little bit like that. And I was really struck by this lovely phrase you use when you talk about going from India to almost India, you know, and I thought, that's such a lovely phrase. Tell me a little bit about your experience of northeastern India.

Like, what did you expect and what did you find and what were your impressions? And, you know, is it comparable to what I just sort of spoke about in my indulgent digression North-Eastern?

That was possibly the biggest unknown in this entire book for me as well, because I didn't know anyone. All of this, not a single thing except for me that I think put another line on, although I didn't know anyone. So I was quite nervous, actually. And the sort of reputation that particular I've enjoys. And it's thirty nine. So there are one out of six days. The highway is one because of these strikes which are called by various insurgent groups.

I know my journey began on a positive note because when I visited the map or like I started off on the map all the time, which is in the planes are pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of India. So then I found out that some insurgent group called upon nandina shut down for two days and you can't go anywhere. You're stuck there. So that's still not only the begun and going forward, I was hoping it would be a bit more safer.

And it was because I encountered these three types who were absolutely amazing. But Anthony, they call themselves. But that really was where the whole microlight moment. I know it's it's almost like my brother anywhere to these that particular doctor, he asked me, are you sure you're not making this up? I was like, no, not at all, because I myself was so taken aback by this thing. I mean, you know, Muslim could sit in one truck.

And the interesting thing there, not just the difference in the religion, it's actually the difference in ethnicity. Like I write in the book, all these three people spoke languages that belong to different language families altogether. I mean, one where where do you find that sort of thing in the war, let alone the India? One of them was a of the countries the world come to us and generations of who has been. So he is going to are in Australia dealing with another type of pork ball, which is a bit longer than one of them was a Bengali Muslim.

So you spoke in language. So these fault lines are so many in the Northeast and now we just think, of course, but there still is in this tribe and even among the Hindus this cause. So quite an incredible place to be in the sense that you got about the Pakistan invasion. I would say definitely more people were repeatedly asked me if I was from India. I know that was that question often was often came from a place of curiosity and slight suspicion also because of the history of the relationship between India and those parts of Spofford instances implemented or whatever.

So there was there was a totally different place. I mean, it reminded me more of the Southeast Asia that I've seen in the Lonely Planet, documentaries and so on, and not as much of India. And ultimately, I kind of learned from money. But eventually, as I write in the book, because I have been on the road for four months and then there were gunshots outside in my hotel in the night, which I still don't know what exactly happened, but it's sort of unknown to me.

And you realize that you are in an environment that is so radically different from mainland India in so many ways that there's no there is a tremendous sense of insecurity, especially in involvement of we might quite like. We always played so many amazing bookshops. And the place is a place quite apart from the fact that everything shuts down at six thirty and only the restaurant still open. The apart from that, the place was quite young and I didn't feel out of the place.

But Informal definitely gave me the creeps. The place and ultimately I decided to go back from the bodily experience was an eye opener to night for my money and I would recommend to listeners to visit sometime just to see what amazing landscapes. And that's the kind of linguistic ethnic diversity India has. It'll blow your mind for sure.

You know, I was struck by how you've written about the massive Korean influence in Infl in Manipur. And also, you know, speaking of linguistic diversity, I was also fascinated by this new language, which you describe to me. Like, of course, like you pointed out, there are all these different language families, Australia, Shitake and Tibetan, Burmese and in the audience, which are kind of mingling together. And you spoke about this new language, which has kind of come out and evolved at the intersection of all of these polygamy's.

Tell me a little bit about that.

Nogami. I found because of this tremendous diversity, you have to arrive at a common language in which you can come with the lingua franca and in the Demopolis and some other parts of is that standard language. It's a mix of the word Assamese Bengali in the age or it's not an entirely formal language. It's a Creole language, not a fully developed language, so to speak, for the people to get by with.

And its history is dated for centuries. Apparently the novelty of all this, it was some years when you collect those Mortons, they were frequently come up to the hills extractable. So this sort of language evolved to enable communication between the neighbours and the Assamese. Now, of course, the scope of the language of an expanded investments are taken in words, the tremendous Behati migration in the world and even in the markets everywhere. So a lot of the holidays are almost all the vegetable, as I saw in Kohima or from the people who are selling frogs and the silkworms in Demopolis on Jodhpur.

It's insane the amount of migration that happens in India and all the interesting encounters. This leads to all the linguistic developments it ultimately leads to. Monogamy is the best example.

Yeah, I was also going to with your description of how they sometimes call themselves Vess South-East Asia, if I remember correctly. One insurgent group has branded itself as the group of north, northeast in the Midwest, Southeast Asia, it is an extremely convoluted way. If you add the north over there, then you have have all the cardinal directions in their name.

So, yeah, I was also kind of struck by sort of the political economy of what's happening in terms of the struggles like you, of course, spoke about, you know, the sort of insurgents and the battles that they're in. And I think another digression, because when I was I had written an essay a long time back about the Maoist insurgencies in the east of India. And I also used the same concept while talking about the gangsters of Yuppy.

But it's essentially a concept which was formulated by the economist call Mancur Olson. And it's a concept of roving bandits and stationary bandits. And the way Olson talks about it is that imagine you're a village and you're just living. And, you know, there's no one ruling over you and you're just living life. But every once in a while, bandits will come and they'll wipe you out and they'll go away. And now there are two kinds of bandits of one kind of bandits, a roving bandit, which is a bandit who is passing by.

And therefore, the incentives of those roving bandits are just to take everything they can and destroy the place and leave it completely barren. And then there are the stationary bandits and the other roving bandits who come there. And then they decided, let's just stay here in this place. There's no need to destroy it. And they basically become the state. So the state is a stationary bandit, but their incentives are different. They don't want to destroy these people.

They just want to keep them at the level where they can continue taking a sort of tribute from these people and continue taking Hoft or taxes or whatever you call it, the other state. And it seems to me that a lot of sort of Low-Level conflict that is happening in India is a conflict between a state that hasn't quite managed to establish the rule of law and become the stationary bandit, which gives it a monopoly on violence. And these other people who are on one hand, they are roving bandits and sometimes they themselves try to play the role of stationary bandits, like in parts of the red corridor, where the insurgents will also try to provide some of those sort of services with that sort of framework fit what you saw in the Northeast, because like at one point there is a striking quote by you where you say, quote, There is no real difference between the policemen and the insurgents.

It's the kind of situation where in the same house, one brother will be a policeman in the other and under water, he says, only half joking according someone here. And they work together in a climate of confidence to talk to you about how you got there, he says, but with no humor this time. So what was your sense of the dynamics of that kind of situation while you were there, especially as you were kind of worried about your own safety in that regard?

So your description fits perfectly with what's happening over there, because they essentially run by the government and it is well established. It's an open secret that of government employees themselves be part of the salaries to the insurgent groups. And all the businessmen have to pay something. If you want to run any kind of business, you have to pay something to do anything. And I am, which is the leading insurgent group. Recently, there was quite a bit of a controversy after the governor of Maryland and he called out all the insurgent groups, call them armed rebels and criminals, armed groups that did not take.

So there was even more controversy after you said that all government employees should disclose which of their relatives are in these insurgent groups, and that led to a lot of discontent among the government employees. So that situation still exists and it has existed over the years because of the insurgents that are not really insurgents. So obviously, they have a propaganda model very few kilometers away from the war that they have their own military set up. And since a couple of decades, they have a cease fire with the Indian state, which has essentially allowed them all these privileges of collecting taxes from the top stockholders will have to bear the brunt of this.

There's also a lot of anger in Albany, certainly. So they are constantly put out because of this and it's bewildering. And you go there and, you know, which is the state in which the insurgents you can never really tell the policemen sometimes of the uniform, but otherwise, so many of the people who are collecting all and tactics that they love nothing more than they look, I'm sure they look like dangerous people by this by the looks on their faces.

And I can never really tell which insurgent group this guy belongs to. This is like the fog of war, right? That's the sort of situation you find yourself in. And that can be very unsettling. I mean, that was part of the reason why I constantly afraid, insecure or because you don't know who the authority is and who the threat is and it also strikes.

I should also possibly clarify on your behalf that when you say the people collecting in taxes had nothing on, what you mean is they had no uniform on. I'm sure that they had something on. Apart from that.

You know, I when I was reading the section of your book in the Northeast, I was actually selfishly hoping that, you know, you would stay there longer and, you know, take one for the team, stay there for a couple of years and write a bit more, because that was just such a fascinating section on other sort of fascinating aspect of the book, which I really enjoyed. And coming back now to India in general, is your sort of detailed breakdown of the trucking economy.

You know, you talk about there, you sort of talk about we've already spoken about cities. We out check this out, but you broken down the trucking sort of economy into a you know, it's different constituent parts, like there is a consigner and then there is the operator. And in between them, there is a booking agent and there is a commission agent. And a lot of the trucking economies of consists of really small players like. Seventy five percent of it is people who own less than five trucks and so on.

You spoken about the information asymmetry, the cartels, corruption and all of that on, you know, again, could be a whole book about the political economy of that and so fascinating. Tell me a little bit about that. What was the journey of discovery through these structures that sort of exist and within the trucking industry in India? The first thing that really struck me was the level of cartelization that is there in the industry. It's quite insane. You know, very small proportion of the booking agent are essentially the guys who are the middlemen for the containers that I want to send these guys to control the prices.

And there is no transparency in how this place is fixed because it's all over the phone. It's extremely opaque. And the way these deals are structured is that the share of the proceeds which goes to the truckload is negligible compared to the effort and the risk that he is putting in this whole enterprise. And he's the one who's putting your life at risk, I think, by going on the road all year. And of course, he's the one who's doing the grunt work, but know 40 to 50 percent of the entire amount that the container pays goes to the middleman.

So as one doctor put it, the law in the other condition. And that really struck me because. Across the landscape, I mean, I don't believe there is any estimate on what proportion of Indians are living just by being human. I mean, I'm sure there's going to be huge light from the agricultural markets where we see the dominance of the through the sort of fixer's that exist even outside government, the government offices, who can get your finance passed.

I mean, all middlemen who are somehow earning a living by doing as little as possible and getting as much as possible in return. And this is the trucking industry is also no stranger to this. In fact, I would say it's one of the industries which is highly dominated by intermediaries. So that was quite a revelation. I found all this was by going to these transport numbers, which are ubiquitous. They are there in almost every small and big city.

You will have one transport another, and all the trucks will go there. In the offices of all the middlemen will be what will connect the supplier to the broker. And these places are quite great. I mean, you can just go to any office that will offer you some divx, some a couple of more cups and you can just sit there and they don't have much on their hands. They'll have their phone calls in between, but they're happy to chat usually.

So I spent quite a lot of time in these transport numbers across India. Every place I went to, I would spend one day and not supporting this type of people and figuring out how things work. So that was quite interesting. And the corruption in the industry accounts for around. Fifty thousand a year, the latest estimates is that fifty thousand rupees is paid in bribes. Vitacost. It is staggering. It's five trillion rupees in just one year and that was quite insane.

And these arrangements are highly organized. That was the striking thing. Like the doctors in the report pointed out to me, they are actually given these quarter receipts. They will be something to give us just to clarify with a guy who is going to extract money that they have already buried. And it's stunning how organized it is. I mean, that will bear the brunt of this. Every person who stops them extract some money from them. And, you know, the survey said that around 40 percent of them give more reason at all.

And the interesting thing is that only 30 percent of them take money in the name of that doctora that some of these local groups will say that will give you others that are needed. So they are not even listed, OK, just random people and maybe linked to the political class in some way. But it's not the government offices. So this is the other thing which was quite striking because there is no difference as such between the state and these sort of shadowy figures who are linked to the local political economy in many ways.

For instance, one top told me that all the money that extracted from them, a lot of mining happens that used to happen and talks about terrible diamond time. But I was on experiences, of course, a lot of idyllic vacations, but watercoolers was just a terrible place. And this is a majority of the people who collect this money on those agents of some local politician. They blurring between the state and you realize what the level of rule of law is that exists in reality on the Indian highways.

And to all the recurring pattern was of this only the complete breakdown of the law in many ways, sometimes by the state itself and sometimes by these extra legal authorities know that that's that's so fascinating to me.

Like that state as the supposedly Chenery bandit, but not managing to be the stationary bandit efficiently. And also all of these little other sort of roving bandits becoming stationary for a while. I'll come back to the corruption angle of it, because that's so fascinating. But first, you know, to go back to the way the economy is structured. So tell me if I got that right. There is a continent who has to send goods somewhere and there is a trucker who is actually taking the goods somewhere.

And in between there are two kinds of agents. One is a booking agent who is dealing with the consigner and saying a ticket, this is the kind of money you take from you to get the job done. And below that is the commission agent who is a guy who the booking agent contacts and who isn't passing the job on to the trucker himself. No overhead. What is happening is, as you pointed out, there is asymmetry of information. Nobody knows what the guy above him in the Fortune is really charging.

And this is a huge problem. So give me a sense of supposing if you have any idea of a broad Motomura idea of these kind of figures that supposing I am a consigner and I am paying a hundred rupees to get my goods taken from extra, why, how much of that hundred is going to the trucker? I would say, I don't know.

60 of that will go to the hospital, 60 will go to that doctor. The intermediary state around for 40 to 50 percent of whatever the money is in the booking. Agents will take more than the commission.

That's really interesting because I don't imagine that if someone manages to disrupt the market and clean up some of the friction between, then the consigner can be 90 instead of hundred and the truck can take 70 instead of 60. And you can still have enough left over for the middleman. But I guess that the middleman themselves are a kind of mafia and they control access. And it would be very difficult to break into that kind of market rate in many ways.

So you talk to some startup folks also who are trying to break this stranglehold of the intermediaries. And so theoretically, it's so easy to make one nice quarter where you connect the container to the. And you just eliminate the theoretical it sounds so simple, but like you said, the word mafia. So the offices of these guys, they were working and we shall overcome at that time, that offices were broken into, pretty much trashed by a local. None of these Butterman who realized that these guys are gaining some traction in the area and putting on business.

So they are quite a powerful segment in this industry. And it all works on the phone for tech adoption and penetration of technology in this industry, especially compared to many others. And given India's terrible networks and you go to the hive in the city so often it's better to go to the hive is no question. So Aldan makes it very difficult to sort of address this and the role of the intermediaries and most of the startups that are in this business logistics base and in the business of removing the intermediaries, most of them have given up.

There are a couple of them, but largely most of them have sort of that tells a lot about how much control and influence the intermediary.

That's that's fascinating. I was also struck by a different parts of your book. There is the intermingling of sort of history with the narrative. And at one point you talk about how she did so many things to eliminate the highway robbery problem, because even though you don't have trucks at that time, you do have goods being transported and you do have the problem of highway robbers. And I'll ask you a bit to elaborate upon that and elaborate on, you know, then the irony that in modern times, as you say in your book, I read out again from what you've written, where you write, quote, If we were to compare medieval and modern India, it would seem things have changed and remained the same.

While the highways today are relatively safer and punishments less drastic, official extraction from Truckers' highway robbery by another name continues unabated, perpetrated with the aid of extractive innovations such as mechanical stockwood and mechanical is within single codes. It's obviously a particular kind of fine that you describe, which was very opaque. And then you got to the bottom of it and you found that it was for flouting rules which are itself written so quickly that they're open to interpretation and therefore it is sort of highway robbery.

And as you pointed out, that is highway robbery by the state and by others. So it seems that there is a culture of highway robbery which has come all the way from Chiuso, Sudhi and all that. And that's also a kind of a fascinating period. So tell me about sort of the historical development of the culture of a road.

So to see the two main highways of historical, you turn up at of it. So these two were the historical main highways, one thoroughfare to link the other to Bengal and then to the heart of the partly through multiple central to the West Coast and tomato's just so. And from there, there were other routes into or out of the other two main routes. And what we see from history is that the private all of those have existed as long as they were roads.

So, for example, if you just look in the distance, the festivities was a notorious highway. But I know this tradition continues. The state did try to curb this menace and make things safer. For example, in the period around 600 B.C., there were officials who were appointed or Rajapakse, whose job was to protect the travellers. And the merchants are those that I think, of course, there were also customs agents will look at because would take money from them, legitimate taxes and so on.

But in practice, highway robbery has been a part and parcel of the transportation culture in India because it think of highway robbery as this violence, the coyotes and bandits would come back to what the highway robbery is also or also takes place when someone without any legitimacy and without any authority is taking money from you. Maybe not using the threat of violence itself, but who's taking money from in a matter of fact, they giving it to them. And that has continued across the state where we have liquidity that does.

So any sort of political authority establishing themselves in a certain area here is either say or whatever the words are passing through this, these gun under my control and anyone who is passing through the entry tax that we call it right now. That's been collected across history, and she is also deeply interesting role in curbing this, but what he realized was all these highway robbers operate. The knowledge and the active cooperation of the village men, which are not on these highways, so the village chairman was a very influential constituency in that thing.

And what he did was that he said if any robbery takes place in one area, it is the job of the village to call them to either find the culprit and compensate for the loss of his property. And if someone is killed, then it is the job of the McCudden to find the audio themselves will lose his life.

So that's a bit stick. But it was during this period at least. And we have the writings of a military historian actually or baschiera who writes about the kind of changes he brought as a figure is just fascinating. Is one of my favorite figures from an industry of partly because he has so much to do with the development of the highway system in India. And he was the one who. The way to deal with what we know is the Grand Trunk Road.

Not only are there no way to get across the entire train of new roads with from Agra to who's not afraid to Mahuad and so on. So we expanded the road network a lot and we also built a network of thousands of cities. So that is being the resting places for travelers. I know many of these cities later than grew to become us, but they were the new pillars of urbanization. So there would be a marketplace which will form around the city.

I told you that marketplace will turn into a small town and that is know a lot of urbanization happened. And even today, the moguls and I said I already the dominant junction's and the name reveals that they originated from a simple, small Saadiyat that has house for travelers so that another one of his contributions would only philosophically is massively underrated in history, partly because he is the sort of an upstart figure who rises from nowhere. Rags to riches often uses unscrupulous means to gain power.

And a lot of role models here to say for newly independent India, which was looking for Modi so very to. But I'm not sure those values fit in with that of a nation like they have secular at the same time they are there and they are non-violent. And all these factors led us to privilege, these figures. And then she is also a brilliant administrator and also secular in his own way. I mean, he did not really discriminate assets in army and so on and on.

The recruitment and administrative innovation themselves were quite remarkable. He introduced it was that he introduced the use of Hindi in the other room. Then in the local administration, a little liberation was used. So this led to good things for the local population. So I'm basically a big fan of the idea. I think he should be more celebrated, maybe a biopic someday, maybe a biopic someday.

If Omar is listening to this, we are in trouble, Roger, and it is your fault. And it's interesting you talk about sort of building up a and Ashoka's modern heroes, because even there I mean, people contain multitudes and even they had different aspects to them. And it's almost as if the you know, they were at one point, you know, sort of presented as these people with these very salutary sides of themselves, Ashoka, the man of peace and all of that, and Akbar being secular and whatever.

And, you know, there were other aspects to that character as well. And perhaps we really matured as a society. Then we can get closer to this embracing of complexity. I kind of smiled when you were talking about the MacAdams because I thought all my listeners would immediately say here is where it talks about incentives. And that's actually a place to talk about incentives and who is like one. Of course, if you're telling them that if you don't catch the table behind you, that is an incentive for them to do the job of policing.

Well, but it is also an incentive for him to catch any random guy he doesn't like and say, that is a thief. I have got him behind him and end of story. So one of those go in different ways. And that would also be unseen in a modern context, because what would we know of the the many people wrongfully implicated by mediæval McAdams? But, you know, coming back to sort of your journeys, it seems to me that when you travel, especially when you travel in the way that you are doing, that you're going to put into context and, you know, where traditions arise from and so on.

You're not just traveling through space, you're also traveling through time. You're not just exploring India as it is today. You're also exploring the history of India. Also get drawn to the sort of history writing and is travel writing to some extent, history writing. Is it a continuum? And do you like you know, you what you're talking about the fascinating history of the 12th century. Ships could look like twenty first century trucks and how that's been documented so much in Pakistan and so much of that is fascinating.

And then also, you know. So do you also then feel like writing a travel book some time, which is a travel time in order to travel to space spaces, such which is just sort of historical?

You know, I am a huge history buff and the more that any history over the years, I realized that travel accounts play such a huge role in our reconstruction, the reconstruction of history, as we know and I know right from us who. Number we were to look out, which gives us so much specific information about India at that point and it is so valuable. But even in these accounts, I find that there is very little mention of the common people about the texture of ordinary life, as it were, because these guys often hang around in circles where the audience itself was often of a courtly background.

So probably they didn't mention they didn't find it important enough to mention. I know, but there is so much power to offer these accounts of the ordinary people that historians struggle so much to reconstruct how the life of an ordinary peasant or an ordinary merchant would have been. And I feel guilty about it because it's so dominated by these the wings of these kings and so on. But how much of that really mattered to the ordinary people? So my motivation for writing is for me, writing is nothing but making the mundane interesting and this capturing the texture of everyday life.

I mean, there are other genres. I mean, in a lot of non-fiction academic research which gets deep into topics and then into thoughtful analysis of them. But for me to have a writing job, which is to document the opportunity and make it interesting for the reader and who knows, hopefully someday the council of as a way to recreate the history of the early 21st century. And that is in the long term. That is what really motivates me.

And that's actually I'm only interested in writing about the ordinary people of India and for their life and their hopes and what they think. These things often go undocumented in other places. I think there's no place to cover them. And I feel very strongly about that. And like I said, I mean, it's deeply connected with history and our attitudes or the particular positions, the circumstances we find ourselves in. Various people have their own little histories that link to their family.

And, of course, in all of this is what is there for me. I mean, for me, just like we say that every person decided to go hard for me and every person who in India and every person is a representative of India in so many ways. And that is what I'm willing to explore and write about. Hopefully in the future I'll get to know that that multiplicity of visions at an individual level is kind of fascinating to me.

You know, earlier in this episode, you spoke about how we experience Goa as tourists, but truck drivers experience it as a much more dangerous, difficult place to navigate. I remember in my years playing poker professionally, I encountered it in a whole different way, which is kind of quite apart from that. And this is a beautiful passage from your book, which kind of speaks to that, which comes from waves of and sort of you are in the Northeast and you go to sleep somewhere on the highway in a truck, and you wake up in the morning and you take a little book and and the underworld is referred to get out of the extremists that you're worried about.

And at this point, you write this passage, quote, Good bye, fugitive underworld underbellies interrupting a journey has been unfolded. Instead, I have witnessed one of the most splendid sunrises of my life, I guess, such as the nature of travel when the true nature of the place reveals itself, or perhaps when you realize there is no true nature of a place. It is merely the images we associate with the place that shape our perception of the human brain is incapable of associating more than a handful of things with the face.

Its job is to underplay complexity and categorize reality into simplicity. That's why one must never internalize anything the world tells you about a place. The only way to travel is to forget everything you think you know about the place discovered it, and you forge new associations, associations that are all your own. I, for one, knew that after this trip I will always remember this sunrise when I think of Nagaland and not insurgents or head hunting tribals. And this was such a beautiful passage in one of the highlights of the book.

And this also leads to sort of a conflict within the travel writer, which in a very minor way, I think I felt when in earlier small travels I made like when I was travelling to Pakistan in 2006 and I like the event, I would put up multiple personality and I was blogging a lot. And at one point I realized that there is a danger here. And the danger is that trying because of that imperative that I have given myself of trying to find the extraordinary in the mundane where I might write about a joke and just imbue it with significance for the person around it.

It's just a joke. It's just a pillow, you Kalachakra notebook, you know. And the other aspect of that, of course, is that as a local person where I am in my cities, whether it's one way or whatever, it is also, you know, has so many layers of all the different centuries and the influences that are here. And both of us, of course, are in Mumbai right now, although remote because of this tragic pandemic.

So wishing there is, then there is a state of that. On the one hand, you want to take a step out where you're certainly more mindful of everything and therefore in a position to recognize the special, but it might otherwise be normalized. But on the other hand, they might also be the tendency for the travel writer, the imperative, so to say the incentive almost to find something special in everything that is ordinary. Is that something that you've thought about?

Like how does one navigate? On the one hand, the travel writers gaze is going to be a little deeper, but is there a danger that it goes sort of too deep? That's an interesting question.

I mean, I have thought about it in the sense that, you know, it is possible to go overboard in contextualising of place. I mean, often what happens is that you go deep. I mean, when I'm writing, I always think about the reader. And for me, the reader is someone who has a smartphone within the range who's going to pick that up the moment you lose it attention. So I.

My attempt always are to. Set the context, but not to the extent where I am losing sight of the place I am, and often what happens is that you get into the history of a place and so on, and you lose sight of what is in front of you. It's often even mundane, like you said. So there is that risk. But I think with all of the travel writer is.

Opens on Monday is full of fascinating realities of multiplicity of the world around, you know, the ordinary person globally, Things Out is a love letter to our writers, to all of us to make them see the beauty in it. And for me, that is what it is. I mean, I am someone who like to see the beauty in everything. I can get a bit annoying, but I genuinely find a lot of things beautiful. I mean, all part of that comes from, I think, science.

I mean, Richard Feynman was a huge influence on me when I was growing up. And the way he sees beauty in the smallest of phenomena in the world is incredibly fascinating and beautiful place. And it is the sort of enthusiasm for the world with which to dance through my writing. And that is what I believe, the purpose of travel.

So I have taken a lot of your time to do so. I'll kind of end with the final question. And at one point early in the book, you talk about this truck driver and you sort of travelling with him and he says he likes you. Come on. And you ask him his favorite song and he names a song and then you ask him to sing. He sings a bit of that and then he feels embarrassed, feeling that he's revealed a bit of himself to you and the lyrics of that lovely song, of course, are good given the a Iraqi military herpetology oneko or danger to The Hague heavy metal metaphorical.

And this sort of seems to me to summarize so well that, you know, the loneliness of the long distance trucker as we spoke about. But is this something that you felt at the end of the book? That was it. The sense of loss that, you know, these are old people who at different levels you must have been close to, like, are you in touch with them? Have you sent your book to any of them? You've mentioned that after all the writing was done, you were still what's happened with them and all of that.

What is that relationship like? And also, it must be a complicated one because at one level they were instrumental to you in the sense that you were using them to go on a journey and write a book. But at the other level, you have been upfront about what you want and they know that. And then on the basis of that, your relationship is kind of building and there is a lot of warmth there. And, you know, one gets a sense of those little little intimacies that are scattered through the book.

So what is it like now when you think of them and also having so many different friends who are not from the earlier bubble you were part of like engineering or journalism or whatever? Does it change the way you look at people in general, like people who are unseen to us in a way maybe to be good at the traffic signal or the person serving at the top of people to feel you kind of look at them differently and that your gaze has been impacted by these experiences.

As far as them being instrumental, I would go as far to say that because, you know, when I set out on the trip, I had no idea I was ever going to come out or I'm even going to write one. I did it mainly to have some fun and make some friends along the way. So, I mean, I did take notes in case it comes down to is the possibility seems remote doing because from what I was thinking at that point was we always want to read about it.

And while I was interested in it, but often this is England. Right. Is this something that's interesting for the wider world and the sale of something that is too obvious and maybe with so that will be used to handle out just like someone will met and who are going to be separated. And suddenly there's all to speak, all that you got in that particular time. Over the years, I have fallen out of touch also with what happens with people, especially when they change so many phone numbers.

They keep changing their phone numbers. I don't know why they change their boss. They will start looking for a different one then their number one team, and they're constantly on the move. It is incredibly difficult to talk to them on the phone because they are always busy driving on the road. And it's incomprehensible on the phone when you try to talk to all these factors, made it very difficult to keep an eye on the people who might do to keep in touch with.

I want to send them a copy of that book. So hopefully they like it because I don't think they can read English. My next plan is to somehow get this translated to English. But no, because there's so much to be at for these for these kind of stories from the hinterland. And even you don't even need to change the title of the book, the title of the book. I hope to get it translated soon. And yeah, I mean, I always see the wider world, I think has remained the same.

I mean, I've always been curious about the underclass. About someone who we don't ordinarily meet and also concerns one, so that part has remained the same. My understanding of the world of Duclos definitely has improved, but the way I view the larger world, I think broadly remains the same, which is something that motivated me to go on this trip in the first place.

And finally, are you are you writing something now? Is this something your devoted readers such as myself can expect from you, or are you taking one for the team in one way or another so that we can read a great book?

Yeah, I am working on my second travel book, so I've signed something with performance and it should come out in the next couple of years. Quite excited. It's another to explode, another glass of it another. And we don't get to read too much about what it's all going to be about the ordinary people of India and their relationship with the world, with Ford and all these things. So it's quite excited about it. And yeah, hopefully the readers will like you will enjoy it.

Sounds fascinating.

And I can't wait and I won't take any more of your time because I want you to get back to writing that book, which I'm so eager to read. Roger, thank you so much for your time and your insights and having the patience to sit through all these technical difficulties as we record this episode. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much entirely. My pleasure. Thank you.

If you enjoy listening to this episode, do head on over to your nearest bookstore, online, offline and pick up digital because wonderful book, Trachte India, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Sun. You can follow on Twitter and YouTube. That's one word you can follow me at Amitava Amitay. We are. And you can browse past episodes of the scene in The Unseen and Seen Unseen. Not again. Thank you for listening.

Did you enjoy this episode of the scene in The Unseen? If so, would you like to support the production of the show? You can go over to see an unseen dot and slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.