Life in a Cab!!!

One of the best perks my company provides me is a pickup and drop facility. Given that I dont really enjoy driving and the drive to Madhapur is not really an enjoyable one, this facility is really a bliss to me. My house is at a distance of 45 mins - 1 hour by car, from my office. So 2 hours of my week day are spent in a cab.

I get a headache when I attempt to do anything like reading in a moving vehicle, thats why I literally end up doing nothing while in a cab. To kill this time, I spend it talking to my friends on phone, taking a short nap at times and sometimes getting into a conversation with my driver mostly initiated by the driver himself.

I have come across a variety of cab drivers. Some are just very silent doing just what they are supposed to do ( these are the kind of drivers I like), some of them pick on the topics I talk on phone with my friends while in cab and start asking me questions on some of the things which I am not very comfortable talking to strangers and some of them initiate a general topic and ask my opinion on them ( if its politics I hardly have any opinion).

But I started believing that there is a whole lot of life that exists around these cabs. Most of the drivers are in their early 20's. Though I am pretty much an introvert, I sometimes break free and indulge in a conversation with them when they initiate it. Some of these guys go upto the extent of sharing their love stories with me. Its strange but I dont get a feeling like "why are u telling all this to me". They dont expect any suggestion from me, but they just want to tell. I hear offering no expert suggestion. I just listen thats it.

Some of their conversations on phone with their friends/relatives, give me a peek into the situations at their home. Some things which we see in old movies, and think "oh the same old tragic family stuff", do exist indeed.

I sometimes wonder what makes me different from them. Why am I leading a fairly comfortable life when that guy of almost my age is working day in and day out just to earn his living. Probably i would have been doing a similar thing if I was born into a family which couldnt have afforded my education. I should be thankful to God and my parents for helping me lead this kind of a life.

But the one thing I find amazing about these young cabbies is that they have a lot of enthusiasm in doing their work. For a while, my daily pickup was done by a driver who didnt mind working for 16 hours a day, just bcoz he was faithful to his supervisor who requested him to work for extra hours as the other drivers werent available. Sometimes, either due to lack of work or excess of work,they tend to drive faster inorder to squeeze in as many kms per day as possible(their revenues are dependent on the distance of their pickups/drops) or finish their drives sooner. Inspite of me(or for that matter anyone) complaining a several times about the rash driving, things dont change.

One thing the IT industry, the BPO industry rather, has done to India is that it not only created employment opportunities in those sectors but also created employment for these whole lot of cab drivers. A whole lot of families are earning their livelihood becoz of this.

Whenever I sit in my cab, I have all these thoughts flowing through my mind, but the moment I move out of the cab, I have many other things to worry about. Just like the cab driver needs to worry about his next pickup/drop. At the end of the day, life goes on ...