Fab Cab Stories, listen from Cabbies

Jostling for space amid food porn, cat videos, and airport "check-ins" is a new breed of social media posts — the cab story. A driver's off-hand yet deeply philosophical observation, the driver with an engineering degree driving just for kicks, the cabbie working double shifts just to send his kids abroad — riders tripping on a fab cab story want to spread the word. And there have never been so many.

But then, thanks to app-based aggregators, cabs have never been such a popular mode of transport. Ola and Uber together completed about 500 million rides in India in 2016, according to a market research report.

The change is succinctly summarised in this tweet from @Carols10cents: "1998: Don't get in strangers' cars — Don't meet ppl from internet. 2016: Literally summon strangers from internet to get in their car."

Predictably enough it had over one lakh retweets. And if internet technology summons the cab, internet technology makes the ride social. Have Facebook account, will post cab conversation.

"People love to read these stories. Earlier too, people would have these experiences, but they were not writing about it. It is a trend that has started now," says Ajay Maurya, who launched the website, mycabstory.com, which crowd sources and collates cab and autorickshaw stories — from both passengers and drivers. "I used to commute a lot and I realised the drivers have so many stories to tell. I have some friends who get into cabs and just put on their headphones. I like to sit in the front and talk to the drivers. Sitting at the back just creates a divide," says the 24-year old web developer from Mumbai.

Comedians too have found a ticket to ride. Late last year, East India Comedy uploaded comedian Sapan Verma's set on an Uber cabbie called Damodar, whose Starbucks-frequenting and Nucleya-listening coolness inspired awe. The same year, comedians Kanan Gill and Naveen Richard uploaded a sketch, "Calling a Cab", where a passenger struggles to direct a cab driver to his location, and the driver finally drives off to outer space, among other places.

But what makes the cab story so enduring? Relatability, Verma supposes. "It's like cracking a local train joke in Mumbai — people get it. Most youngsters today use these cabs. I don't think we had as many conversations earlier," he says.

But it's not just the passenger telling all the cab stories, some drivers too have special encounters to report. Gagandeep Singh drives for Ola Cabs. The 37-year-old, who doesn't drive as much as he used to, runs 14 cabs in Delhi. He calls himself a "Stepney" — fills in when required. And the requirement mostly arises from boredom, or when he wants to meet new people. And he's met quite a few already, like his favourite RJ, and the physiotherapist of the under-17 Indian cricket team. He recalls a couple he dropped off at the airport — an Egyptian man and a Mexican woman. They were to part ways there, and they cried the entire way. "I passed them some tissues, and told them everything was going to be okay. The Egyptian man hugged me tight before he left. He even phoned me later," says Singh.

Not all cab stories are upbeat. Bengaluru-based journalist Sandhya Menon recently shared a story on Twitter. This was from a cabbie complaining of the disturbing frequency with which drunken passengers throw up and pass out in his cab. Nasty experiences from passengers are all too common as well. In March this year a Delhi woman shared a harrowing experience of being harassed by a cab driver who misused the app and even posed as customer care when she tried filing a complaint.

One thing's for sure, it is far more common to come across cab stories narrated by passengers than the other way around. Websites and Facebook pages like thebetterindia.com and Humans of Bombay have tried to even things out by having cabbies and autorickshaw drivers narrate their own stories.

"To me, shamefully, it is a matter of privilege. You often don't see the driver as a human being who is just like you. When you have a conversation where you realize that the cabbie is just like you, and you think, 'let me tweet this' — it often comes from a place of condescension," says Menon. "We have to realize that the person behind the wheel is not an automaton. They are real people with a story," adds Maurya.

Journalists, admittedly, have been some of the worst offenders in the pre-social-media-cab-story-sharing department. In 2006, Pulitzer-winning author and journalist Thomas Friedman wrote about a cab driver in France being "too busy" speaking into his Bluetooth headset to chitchat with him. "You know the old story, 'As my Parisian taxi driver said to me about the French elections ... 'Well, you can forget about reading columns starting that way anymore. My driver was too busy to say hello, let alone opine on politics," he wrote in his New York Times column.