Taxi,taxiiiii....

It was heartening to read in the press that our very own Ambassador car was voted the best taxi in the world, though one would not agree with it if one had the misfortune to take a rickety one in Kolkata. Over the years, I have travelled in taxis in several countries right from a Maruti 800 to an obscenely ostentatious Lincoln stretch limo. The experience varied from place to place.

I love getting in to conversation with taxi drivers. Unfortunately, my pseudo ‘Burra Sahib’ ego stops me from sitting in the front passenger seat. However, this does not prevent me from holding unfettered discussions with the cabbie. I suppose that being cooped up in the front seat the whole day, the driver also craves for some banter.

Taxi drivers in Singapore do not encourage idle gossip. The distances are short and they are already looking for the next passenger. They return your change exactly and are on their way. So is the average London cab driver. He is polite but the way the taxi is designed, there is no way one can have a proper dialogue. The private taxis in the UK are slightly different from the London cabs. On my first visit, there was this smart guy in a black suit with a board with my name. I presumed that he was a senior executive or the owner of the taxi company. I later found out that this was the standard uniform for these drivers.

The China cabs are a bit funny. The driver sits inside a fibreglass cage. I was quite puzzled until I was told that it was to protect the driver from a possible car-jack.Apart from this, of course, is the language barrier. At the airport, they help you with a diagram to your destination that you hand over to the driver. So, until the destination there is no conversation.

Australia has an interesting cauldron of ethnic mixture in its taxi drivers.I have been driven by cabbies from Egypt,Lebanon,CIS countries and ,off course,our very own Indian boys.Most of the Indian drivers are students,mostly from Punjab and Haryana.They take up part-time cab driving to take care of their living expenses.

In the US, things are a bit different. It is not in every city that you get a proper city cab. New York is a good example to chat with drivers as they are invariably from the Punjab (it does not matter from which side of the border). I have had a tête-à-tête in my poor Hindi about Bollywood films, the popular stars and their personal lives. In Detroit, I had a Pakistani driver. He was a qualified doctor from a proper medical college in Lahore. His was an arranged marriage with a US citizen and so relocated. Poor guy could not practice in his new country. He revealed to me that unlike Asian doctors, the US medics would never come to a quick diagnosis, in spite of clear symptoms, for fear of medical malpractice suits. There were times when the local doctors consulted him for his opinion.

However, in India itself there are varieties of taxis. The most ‘dented-and-not-painted’ ones are in Kolkata. In the seventies right in Park Street, my driver parked his car, got out and joined a morcha that was passing by. I looked silly sitting in the back seat not knowing when I would reach my destination.

One danger of becoming too familiar with the cabbie is that you end up being morally bound to be generous with the tip. Nevertheless, that is a small price to pay in return for some verbal stimulation.

Life of crime

For several years my wife has led a life of leisure, with most of her domestic work being handled by hired help. Every now and then, to make herself relevant she gets in to her house-spring-cleaning mode. I dread this because generally my belongings are her target to jettison.

Recently she unearthed from the loft a large plastic bag containing assorted items and confronted me with that. Initially I was inclined to follow Emraan Hashmi in “Ghanchakkar” and claim temporary amnesia about the contents. Instead, I decided to pursue the manly route a la John Abraham in “Shootout at Wadala” and took the flashback path to narrate my life of crime.

Like any criminal I started off in a small way. A few months in to my working life, I got a chance to travel on official work to Delhi. The hotel where I stayed was beyond anything that I had experienced. On the last day I gathered courage and put the hotel stationery in the room in my briefcase. My heart skipped several beats till I was ensconced in the safe confines of the taxi taking me to the airport.

After that I was like a shark who had tasted blood. Stationary was passé. I graduated to soap, shampoo and body lotion. As I went up the ladder and began staying at better class of hotels, the first thing I did after entering my hotel room was to check out the items ripe for the picking. Back home my collection increased to toothbrushes, combs, sewing kits, laundry bags, shoe shiners, shoehorns and a variety of ball pens. The housekeeping staff at the Trump Hotel, New York must still be mystified at the sudden disappearance of a bathrobe from one of the rooms.

I went out of control when I started my overseas travel. Anything ‘foreign or imported’ had a different aura. The airline cutlery was particularly tempting. There are still some of them being used in our home even today. Unfortunately, nowadays airlines are taking the safer route of plastic items that are not worth pilfering.

One mystery that I have not been able to solve occurred nearly forty years back. Our company CEO was on a visit to Bangalore and invited a few of the staff to a five star hotel in High Grounds. I was a staunch teetotaler those days. However, my boss convinced me that Bloody Mary was just a spicy tomato juice. I loved the taste and soon finished six of those. We then went upstairs to the Chinese restaurant for dinner. Next morning on waking up in my bachelor pad I had no recollection about what had transpired the previous night. I also had no clue how I had become a proud possessor of a red and white checked napkin that was wrapped around a set of shiny fork, knife and spoon with the hotel name engraved on them. To compound this further, there was also an unwrapped roll of toilet paper.

Today, I am a reformed criminal. But there are times when temptation mocks me. Like when I visited Barcelona…