Wisdom of a Truck Driver

Hearing the rambles of politics, lifestyle & Philosophy from a normal man

I was carrying 15 bean bags for our JavaScript code fest event on a truck with a driver and I was listening to his ideologies and lifestyle. I am still not sure how I should start the blog post but here it goes.

There is a bean bag rental service which I contacted to get the bean bags for the event. I also got hold of a number of a driver who usually transports bean bags. I got the bean bags packed to the truck. I got onto the front seat and the driver got in. He asked — “Are we going to the place he mentioned” (He as in the bean bag rental guy. I told him I wanted it delivered to the event location).

While we went ahead for about 500 meters — he asked for my name and we got a friendly conversation going. First he started talking about the traffic on the roads and the fuel wastage.

I was starting to get annoyed at first but then I started to listen, to this man’s talk about fuel wastage — I felt human.

He proceed on to tell me about the wastage by vehicles in the road and how the current political system will not do anything. He criticized about the people who vote for the current government. “People has a tendency to vote to the party their father voted or their grand father voted. UNP guy will alway be UNP in Sri Lanka. People don’t look at the economy or the countries’ situation before voting.”

Then he started to talk about education — he asked me how old I am and I lied to him saying that I’m 21. Frankly speaking I didn’t want to tell him I’m 19. He was surprised and told me that I’m young. He then asked about whether I did A/L and I told him no. He asked me about O/L and I told him yes. The surprise was the next question -

“Did you pass O/L?”

From this I understood — this man was underrating me but the magically question was why? There is a man carrying an iPhone who speaks good English on the phone and the Truck Driver, assumes that he hasn’t passed O/L.

Then he reveled — his youngest son has got 9As for O/L and his daughter was at Peradeniya University. His oldest son was at a university in New Zealand. Then I knew from where he got his pride.

Even though I felt a little hurt being compared to a man who hasn’t passed O/L (for political correctness- I’m doing my second Master’s degree now) — I started to understand him.

He then talked about the 9 to 5 people.

People who goes to office at 6:30 AM and comes home at 10:30 PM in the night. He was talking about the rat race.

“Some father’s try to buy their son’s cars, bikes after they pass exams. I’m not like them. I gave everything I could for my children’s education,” he said. He also stated about the morals that are being enforced in the kids. If the kid got a bike — he’ll try to buy a car for his child. The truck driver started comparing the european culture. Next was village culture changing into the fore mentioned european culture. He was not fond of it.

All in all — I heard his side of the story for about 45 minutes while I silently nodded in agreement for what he was saying. Short story long.