Vignette number 1: Trucks

An interesting thing happens to Indian roads shortly after midnight. The surge of hatchbacks and auto-rickshaws drains to allow the road’s more purposeful denizens to carry on their nocturnal journey. Given the chaos of India’s copious and profligate peak hours, it makes sense for trucks to occupy the roads in the dead of night. However sensible this may be, it does commit them to long voyages through an unlit country. In a defiant attempt to illuminate these otherwise blackened routes, each truck is painted in vividly fluorescent colours and garnished with streamers, tassels and other decorations. Some have psychedelic Buddhist glyphs splashed across their sides; others have indiscriminate advertisements fastened to them, the only criteria for the suitability of which seemingly the level of dazzle discharged. It’s an encouraging sight, and one that is a characteristic reflection of this country’s rambunctious spirit.

It is also a little eerie. Unlike the daytime Daytona produced by India’s usual commuting lunatics, these trucks – assembled into flotillas of up to one hundred - progress through the night almost at a snail’s pace, emitting a whale tone of one hundred low geared engines.

India’s growth is beheld in these trucks. Their payload is the lifeblood of a burgeoning economy, and as India sleeps these giant road centipedes ensure that factories are supplied, barges are filled and the produce of a billion people delivered – night after night.