Skip to main content

More conversations with cabbies


As we travel into town on an uncharacteristically quiet Sunday evening, the Bangalore roads are relatively traffic free, but the driver of the Meru cab decides to take me by the "easy route" where we will drive uninterrupted by traffic lights. He swings off the four lane highway into a quiet side street that seems to go on and on in the darkness, and I am beginning to wonder if I should have insisted on the bright lights of the main road. But just as my anxiety is beginning to take a dangerous turn, he points out to me a looming wall on my left. It is very high, and soon we come to a pair of massive gates that seem to hide something very important inside. "That's YSR's son's house," the driver notes. "Jagan. That's where he stays when he comes to Bangalore. He owns this whole stretch of land." I made suitably amazed-disbelieving-indignant sounding noises. Just enough to make him go on. "I once took a passenger in there, he was a guest of YSR's, when he was still alive." He went on to talk about how he ended up staying with the guest for his entire visit, driving him around town, being served his meals at the mansion in between. A veritable palace inside those high walls, it seems. You must meet some interesting people, I say, warming up to what promises to be a good way to keep my mind of the long, dark, unfamiliar road. But he was right, we haven't seen a single traffic signal. No traffic to signal.

I learn about the economics of running a Meru cab (Rs 1100 per day goes to the company for use of the cab and their GPS tracking services; he makes around Rs 300 to 500 a day after dues have been paid; no work, no profit, only dues) and the system of quality control (speed violations are recorded immediately, as are any complaints from clients). But there are unexpected bonuses. Mahesh recounts how he had done dedicated duty for a Dutch software professional who was in the city for two days and liked the fact that he spoke English (he was delighted to speak with me in Telugu). When she returned to Bangalore 3 years later she tracked him down (despite the fact that he had switched vehicles). He had forgotten her and wondered who this foreigner was who had asked for him, specifically. Of course, when he met her he remembered having driven her around. When she left, she took him to a Raymond's store and bought him a suit length. "I had never in my life gone into a store like that," he told me.

The next morning I was in another Meru cab, with Santosh, who had been caught in the melee the previous day when thousands of people thronged the streets to catch a glimpse of the Tamil actor Vijay, hailed as the next Ranjnikanth, who was in Bangalore to open a jewelry store near Commercial Street. "It was crazy, people were climbing over cars to see him--and he was here for barely five minutes. I thought my vehicle was going to be damaged," recalls Santosh.

You just never know where the next story awaits you. Sometimes on long dark stretches of road where the conversation lights up the lonely miles. Or on an early morning drive that would have been otherwise occupied by anxious wonderings about the workshop ahead.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A house called Ayodhya

How do words get taken away from you? How do they mutate and reconfigure around entirely new meanings, only weakly related to those that they held when you owned them? And then, through repetition and constant association, they solidify into these new forms, their other histories hidden behind impenetrable layers, where they have not been erased altogether.   I live in a house whose name often elicits a curious look, raised eyebrow, a muffled cough, a judging eye, or even a vigorous nod of approval. But for even the least politically minded, the name is evocative of something. For some of us, it is the wave of negativity, divisiveness, and violence unleashed by the events of a December three decades ago. For others, it may represent the righteous assertion of identity.   But the name etched into the gate pillar, now fading and diminished when compared to the glitzy lettering on neighbouring walls, has nothing to do with the politics of place and claimed heritage. It is a simpl...
2 comments
Read more

Talking about Talk: a conversation with Sherry Turkle

Credit: CNN Image s The Tang Building sits on the southern edge of the MIT campus, overlooking the river whose grey this autumn afternoon acts as a foil to the gold and auburn of the trees across its wide span. I rush up the stairs to the second floor—I am a minute past the appointed hour—and arrive, just a little out of breath, on the second floor. The corridor is dark and the roomy lobby leading to the room that bears the number I’ve been given is even darker. I check my phone again to make sure I have it right and then venture inside, flipping the light switch and finding a spot on a comfortable sofa. One never feels quite prepared for an interview. Especially when it involves someone who has already been in the media eye over the years, whose engaging commentaries on life in the digital age have found their way to the TED stage and from there into millions of YouTube and Facebook shares, whose books straddle the academic and popular; someone who could be the Nora Ephron ...
2 comments
Read more

Remembering Ja

Ja (right) with Maxine, at the Alternative Network meeting, 2004 I opened the newspaper this morning and way down at the bottom of page five was a small insert in remembrance of an old friend and sometime mentor, Janaki Iyer, known simply as "Ja" to many of us.  I myself took a decade or more to make the transition from "Mrs Iyer" to "Janaki" to a very hesitant "Ja"--the diminutive seemed not to do justice to a woman who in a very gentle and quiet way had touched so many people, young, old, and like myself, somewhere in between. First, the specifics. Janaki was a teacher from start to finish. After many years of teaching in an upscale Bombay school, she moved to Hyderabad and, with an enthusiastic friend, started Ananda Bharati, a learning space for children of migrant labourers, in a small room in the YMCA, Tarnaka. Many of those children went on to join the mainstream school system and complete their secondary education; a few even obtai...
3 comments
Read more