Amusing CAB Rides

In this journey of life , you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them... 

Life has an ability to occasionally surprise us during the most mundane and routine activities; one just has to pause a bit and observe one's surroundings and discover the hidden details even as we rush headlong through these.

I travel frequently for work and on a few of these journeys I have had amusing experiences with respect to Cab Drivers. 

The most interesting out of these was in Maitland, Florida where I had traveled for a meeting and after getting down at the Orlando airport, I walked to the Taxicab Counter and requested for a Cab. They flagged in one and in a minute, this cab came to a rolling stop next to me and out came an old Indian (Asian) looking man with a thick white beard. 

"Hello" he said and asked me "Are you an Indian?" I said yes as he helped me load my suitcase into the cab.

On the way to the hotel he started talking about himself and his family and I realized that he was a "Pakistani" gentleman. A rare breed I presume. My usual disposition would be to ignore the driver and check my e-mails during the drive. It never ceased to amuse me that here I was an Indian sitting in the back seat of a cab being driven by a Pakistani driver and beginning to strike a conversation with him. 

Another thing that dawned on me during all this was that he was speaking excellent English, not the American variety but something that a very polished convent educated diplomat would speak.

Surprising!! Cause that's usually never the case with Asian Cab drivers in the US. Normally they would speak broken English and never have that confidence of education in their bearings. Now that definitely grabbed my attention and I started engaging him in a conversation to dig deeper. 

I soon found that this guy was an ex-business man who was cheated by his partner and was hence reduced to driving a cab as he was too independent to ask for help from his children. His children were doctors / surgeons and were well established. 

Then came the most interesting part of the story;

Apparently this old gentle man was part of the counsel of lawyers who were defending ex prime minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir Bhutto's father) who was later on hanged to death by the army dictatorship without a fair trial. This old gentleman was among the youngest lawyers on that panel and apparently belonged to a very respectable and influential family in Pakistan. He later left Pakistan after refusing to serve the dictatorial government. 

Whether he was telling me the truth or spinning a yarn is something I will never know, but either way, it was a damn interesting conversation with a man who was a unknown part of Pakistani Political history or a cab driver with a Psychotic disorder.

An even earlier experience was with a Somalian Cab Driver who was my first cab driver in the US when I landed in the US (Phoenix) for the first time in 2003. He apparently was a Raj Kapoor fan and started reeling out some Raj Kapoor songs :-), making my first Cab ride to Scottsdale pretty interesting. Of course I was a sucker for that story and the guy ended up with a $10 tip.

Another interesting cab ride was similar in nature and has become my regular ride to the airport these days. He picked me up at my residence to drive me to the airport and immediately after we left, he received a call on his cell and he started speaking in beautiful French Language. Having studied French for 3 years in school and since I have an affinity for the language, I was happy to hear someone speak such beautiful French language. This guy was from the Ivory Coast an erstwhile French colony and to my surprise he also knew a good deal about Raj Kapoor and told me that he had seen a few of Raj Kapoor movies. 

Interesting but I can safely assume that Raj Kapoor is probably the second most famous Indian. The first one being a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi! 

Tendulkar, Shahrukh and Amitabh still have a long way to go. So cab rides can be interesting too...!!