Sethi Xpress: People Are In Love With This Bara Chakka Drivers’ Vlogs
Umran Hussain
The Kashmir Radar: A young boy marred by financial constraints in his childhood struggled to help his family soon after he left his schooling after passing 8th class examination from a local goverment school.
Popularly known as ‘Sethi Xpress‘ across all social media platforms, this young boy is a popular truck vlogger and propably the first vlogger of this kind from Jammu and Kashmir.
Coming from a small village, Pashpora of South Kashmir’s Shopian district, Sethi initially worked in a houseboat in Kashmir’s famous dal Lake as a service provider and later as a salesman in a boot house, but he was forced to leave those jobs as they would fetch him peanuts which hardly helped him make a decent living.
Sethi later started accompanying his maternal uncle to other states of the country in a truck and helped him in loading and unloading the goods which finally ignited a spark in Sethi and inspired him to become a truck driver.
“I struggled in getting behind the wheel, as carrying goods to other parts of the country is a challenging job for a trucker. I had to wait a lot to burn the rubber on my own on the famous and notorious Jammu Srinagar National Highway.” Said Sethi in an open Mike session organised by Adams Apple.
Sethi after learning all the driving skills and reigning a truck with 12 monster tyres, popularly known as “Bara Chakka,” started sharing videos of his journey on social media and one fine day Sethi learned from one of his friends that his “Sethi’s” video has fetched 4 million views on YouTube.
Boosted by the amount of love expressed by the viewers on YouTube, Sethi started his own YouTube channel and became a full time ‘Truck Vlogger’ and started sharing the happenings of his trip to other parts of the country and back to the valley.
After sharing a few videos, he received a tremendous response on YouTube and soon earned a ‘Silver Play Button’ after his channel was subscribed by more than one lakh subscribers.
With more than 57 thousand followers on Facebook and 36 thousand followers on Instagram, Sethi is the first and only vlogger from Kashmir having such a huge fan base.
After scanning through all his profiles, we found that his videos receive a good response from the viewers, apparently for their uniqueness. He shares the way he starts off his journey, the way he cooks food in the cabin of the truck, the hardships he face on the way to his destination and much more.
Another reason of great response to his videos than other vlogger’s in Kashmir is that driving a truck is seen as a challenging task and everyone doesn’t drive a truck, so they want to get acquainted with this unusual experience of a truck driver, while almost everyone on social media has visited the tourist places and parks which other vloggers in Kashmir try to show in their videos.
