Blogging with the Mumbai cabbie

The man — a khaki-clad fellow; and the machine — a kaala-peela Fiat Padmini. The metre goes down and what you get is a symbol for the city of Mumbai — so that wherever you are in the world, the image of a black and yellow taxi will make you
think of this metropolis.

Kabi Cubby Sherman was so fascinated by this four-wheel drive, a common sight on city roads, that she decided to document all of it through podcasts of conversations with the drivers and photographs of taxi-art on her blog meterdown.wordpress.com — writings about the city through conversations with Mumbai’s taxi drivers.

Meterdown is full of images — there are pictures to the go with the podcast, so the taxi driver isn’t disembodied. But it is a certain cabbie-spirit, if one can say so, that catches hold of you, once you turn the volume on. So what are these conversations about? “I bring out urban issues of migration and change in the city through these simple conversations.

Most of these guys are migrants. What do they leave behind? And where do they belong? What is home to them? And amid all this, they also see the city change in a different light altogether,” says Kabi.

Kabi, who has lived all over the world, from Los Angeles and New York to Singapore, has been in Mumbai since 1993. She has learnt Hindi over the years, dabbling in several things — from working as executives in IBM and Reliance to assisting NGOs and  dabbling in photography. Kabi started her blog in July. She had loads of taxi photographs and tons of conversations, and there was something she wanted to do with them.

Her passion for the taxi also stems from the fact that Kabi herself has been a cabbie at one point of time. “I would have never known LA the way I do if I hadn’t driven a cab for three years. So cabbies know the city in a very different way than we do,”
she says.

There are developments that directly affect the taxi drivers, that Kabi wants to talk about. With newer taxis coming in, the RTO has passed the ruling that Fiat taxis over 15 years old will not be allowed to run on city roads. “Where will the drivers go? The private companies are looking for graduates to drive the new cabs. Everything is changing,” says Kabi.

Many drivers treat their cabs like offices, personalising it, while some think of it as a second home, many even sleep in them. Mumbai’s cabs are a colourful and interactive lot. And so, on the blog, taxi art follows. Heaps of photographs jump at you — intricate designs and messages ranging from “love is sweet poison” and “love is life” to random ramblings like “expect” and “never mind”.

But who is Kabi? “I’m just a mediator, trying to project their voices. I want their voices to reach out to people. So that when we take a ride with them, we know who they are,” she says.