CHENNAI : One of the most perceivable iconic scenes in cinema, on the western front, is a monologue of sorts in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver; it involves the protagonist Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro rehearsing in front of a mirror. The most memorable part of the scene, or rather what it’s most remembered for is a particular line of dialogue: it goes something like this — “You talking to me? Are you talking to me?”The rest of the scene involves De Niro going on a tangent and just trying variations of the same. But here’s the best part, that line, one that holds a special place in a film students’ idea of ‘cult’ was improvised. It’s not something the writer or the director came up with, but the actor made it up on the spot. At this point, you are probably wondering what this has to do with Madras, and you wondered right because this has nothing to do with Madras, except for the part where an actor playing a taxi driver in a film called the taxi driver improvised lines of dialogue.
Well, what does that have to do with taxi drivers in Madras? That’s a great question; your attention to detail is impressive today. This is a tale of taxi drivers in Madras and their ability to spark a conversation out of nowhere; scratch that; this is an amalgamation of all conversations I have had with taxi drivers ever since the advent of app-based taxi services.
Taxi drivers have become an important part of our cultural vocabulary; in a day when we share a relationship that borders on the line separating love and hate-love, we find ourselves making observations that could make for a good story at a social gathering.Right from the classic “Map la seri ila, neenga route sollunga” (The map isn’t the best, just tell me where to come) to the rare but insightful “Late night laan taxi edhukadhenga” (It isn’t safe to get a taxi late at night).
And often, it’s perceived as a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but the perception sighted in tunnel vision came to a close when we found ourselves fighting the same monster: a monster covered with the evils of capitalism. Surge prices for us were incentives for them. All of us chasing, finding loopholes to beat the system; to not let the greedy capitalist make money of us.
In a city like Madras where the divide between the cultural and the cosmopolitan isn’t about its divide, but rather about its portmanteau, it’s hard to separate a taxi driver, a pawn in the service industry, from us, a pawn in our own ways — both of us fighting battles that aren’t very different from each other.
The next time you book yourself a taxi and find yourself with a driver who might have woken up on the wrong side of the bed or rubbed you the wrong way, remember, it’s just one giant battleground, and the driver is just wearing a different costume.