CHENNAI: India is a country that exuberates bright colours. Look around and you will understand what that means; life is soaked in a million hues. Not even the highways are drab and dreary on the gloomiest rainy day. Sharing space with your fancy mean machines are the good old lorries chugging along with overloaded cargoes, enveloping you in a cloud of smoke, while gently reminding you that the only means of escape is to ‘Horn Ok, Please’! Daily encounters with these vehicles may have perhaps made us blind to the fact that most trucks are indeed elaborately decorated works of art.
Termed Truck Art, this genre treats the body of the vehicle as a canvas. Varied elements which embody the cultural beliefs and religious motifs, as well as socially relevant messages, are painted on them in an outburst of colours and patterns. Popular in South Asia, especially in India and Pakistan, it started in the 1920s when India’s streets were lined with trucks from England.
They had ornate wooden prows fitted on top, decorative bumpers and wooden panels running along the cabin. In the late 1940s, the companies that owned these trucks had their logos painted on them as a means of popularising their name even among the illiterate, as they sent their trucks to distant lands to deliver goods. These logos slowly turned into fancy ornamentations. The belief was that the more ostentatious the design, the better it was for the business.
This flamboyance comes with a price, of course. Truck Art is expensive and requires maintenance too. Yet, no matter the cost, it is hard to come across a lorry that has no art to proclaim. Painting on a truck is an industry by itself with artists who specialise in it. Recently, this genre of art was used for a social cause too. Pakistan reports nearly 3,000 children as missing each year. Kidnapped, abused and trafficked, most of these children are never found. As the reach of media is almost absent in remote areas, it was almost impossible to spread the message that would help in locating them.
This was when Truck Art stepped in and found a solution. An NGO that worked towards finding these missing children, collaborated with Berger Paints as a sponsor, along with artists and truck companies to paint the portraits of these missing children on the trucks, with a helpline number. As the trucks traversed the length and breadth of the country, calls started pouring in on the helpline and within a span of four weeks and twenty painted trucks, three children were reunited with their families.
The initiative has been responsible for many such rescues thereafter too. As we journey with a bundle of thoughts weighing us down and cocooned in our own private worlds, we often do not even notice these cheerfully hued vehicles of our culture. Yet, our roads would never be the same without them. May these mobile works of art continue to be true reflections of the beauty of our country.