Unfair

Auto rickshaws and their drivers in Bangalore are strange economic phenomena. It is worth getting into some details about their business model. They are supposed to take you from point A to point B and charge a fee for it. The fee, being based only on the distance and the waiting time, is something a lowly mechanical meter can calculate. And it does. But the strangeness of the whole affair comes from the fact that what you really pay is the outcome of a complex mathematical expression in which the fee calculated by the mechanical meter is only one variable. Some of the other variables are the population density of the two points A and B, the average annual income of the people residing in those places (as guesstimated by the driver), the quality of the roads connecting the two points, the driver's impression of how much you earn, the number of people you are with and how much better you are at the game of chicken that commences as soon as it is time to pay.

So, I generally ride the bus.

But the other day, I didn’t have the option. I walked up to a parked auto and asked him if he could take me to point B. He nodded of course. But before he could start, he said "It'll cost you forty rupees." . My anger management techniques constantly fail to work. "What, then, is the meter for?", I asked without making much of an effort at being courteous. To which he replied "The meter charge will be 36 rupees, I'm only asking for 4 rupees more." . I had become somewhat of an expert at this and so proceeded to get off the auto. He offered to take me for the meter charge and so I got back in.

Once on our way, he said very gently "If people like you start behaving like this, how are we to make a living?". I'd have told him that I hadn’t signed up to make sure he made a living. I'd have - if I didn’t know how right he was.

It was an ugly truth indeed. Behind the beautiful illusion of greedy drivers trying to suck up all the blood from their unsuspecting passengers, was the simple ugly truth that most of them probably just broke even. They drive rented autos, pay a high price for fuel, live in overpriced rented houses, pay for the overpriced worthless education, have wives that work as housemaids for peanuts, breathe lot of polluted air and die very soon. Yes, this picture is probably not accurate. I've met drivers who can only be described as leeches. The truth remains, however, that the real problem here is not greed.

So, when he said that, I told him how I preferred to ride the bus so as to avoid arguments with auto drivers. And he said that he wouldn’t have asked me for more had he known how fed up I was with his kind.

I returned to the book I was reading - The Enchantress of Florence. Sikri and Akbar and all the elephants and wealth. That must've been some time. But someone had his leg cut off for stealing a pair of shoes. Such punishments have now been replaced with fines and imprisonment. Steven Pinker, Robert Wright and Chris Anderson would immediately point out how much better our times are.

But in front of me was this man with graying hair who just lost a game of chicken with a youngster and lost four rupees. A tiny fraction of how much the youngster would tip a waiter.

Auto rickshaws are only the things I hate second most to get into. The first being shopping malls in Bangalore. And when I do, again, when I'm left with no choice, I find myself getting very irritated at the crowd. The people, what they do, what they wear, what they read (or don’t read) , what they buy and how much they pay - everything irritates me. I probably have experienced too much of the other extreme and know too much about auto drivers to feel a part of it all. To think that the crowd I see is only riding a wave and not reaping benefits of real hard work makes the jobs of the overspending shoppers seem less respectable than the ones of the haggling auto drivers.

The driver interrupted me as I was enjoying Salman Rushdie's dissection of Akbar's psyche. He asked me where I was from and if I was studying or working. I answered and then asked him about his kids. His two kids were in school. They were living in a different town - probably because the education there was not as overpriced. The elder one was good at school but the younger boy was just ok. He said his kids would never study as much as I had because he couldn’t afford. The ubiquitous vicious cycle. I told him that good education was the only passport to a good life and that he should make sure they understood that. Actually, I'm sure he knew it better than I did.