Life for Indian truckers is incredibly hard. Long hours, terrible roads, little pay and knackered trucks.Breakdowns are par for the course, often in places where the nearest mechanic is three days away and the nearest spare part is probably too expensive to buy anyway. So the truckers have to get creative.Though there’s a fine line between creative and suicidal. Faced with a knackered starter motor, this bloke jump starts his wagon by tying a rope through the wheel and cranking it round until the engine fires.Ingenious, but if he got the timing even slightly wrong or his hand caught, his arm would have been ripped off. At best..Incidentally, back when I was a bus driver I faced a similar problem. I was advised to cross the points on the starter solenoid with a big screwdriver. Easy enough, but it meant putting the hand holding the screwdriver about two inches from the fanbelt. As the engine caught, I dropped the screwdriver and leapt back with a yelp I’d rather no-one else had heard. It worked, but it remains the single scariest thing I’ve ever done...
