Portrait of an unknown Indian

Forty-year-old C. Sakthivel is a walking talking advertisement for his employer Olacabs. A Bengaluru-based, English-speaking civil engineering contractor who, when the real estate business slowed, recently signed up as a driver for the popular taxi-hailing service.

He had been driving for 20 years and it was just a matter of upgrading his current car, a Hyundai i10, to a Hyundai Accent. The monthly repayment of his bank loan is a manageable ₹ 7,000 when you consider he saved ₹ 40,000 after expenses in his first month of being an Ola driver. “Within three years I can pay back my dues. It’s more than I was earning when I was working in construction,” he tells me over a cappuccino.

Every morning, after dropping his sister’s children to school, Sakthivel, an affable and oddly reassuring man of big build, switches on the smartphone device he got from Ola to indicate he’s on duty. Sakthivel says Ola drivers are credited 80% of the fare they earn plus cash incentives ranging from ₹ 200-2,000, depending on the number of trips they log in a day. He sets himself a daily target of around 10 trips—not too easy, not too difficult. “I don’t take tension,” he says.

He doesn’t have to worry about a roof over his head. His father, also a civil engineer (and clearly a man of vision), built a five-bedroom, five-bathroom house for himself and his three children 30 years ago in the Vijayanagar neighbourhood. The family, originally from Salem in Tamil Nadu, has lived there ever since.

Sakthivel enjoys gory horror movies, much to the despair of his mother. He enjoys cooking and on Sundays, he takes over kitchen duty while the two women of the house—his mother and his sister—sleep late. Sunday breakfast is usually chicken curry and idlis, but his culinary repertoire is not restricted to this. He’s an expert at fried snacks, chicken pepper fry and vegetarian food. Thanks to an early stint working at a Chinese restaurant, he knows how to make fried rice, egg noodles and that all-Indian favourite, gobi Manchurian. He believes that men are better cooks than women.

The civil engineering diploma holder started his own construction business in 2010. By then he had worked for 15 years in India and West Asia. But when the construction contracts dried up six months ago, he began looking for other work. As a taxi driver, he figured, he was bound to meet lots of potential customers.

Call me if you have any work, he tells people and hands out a business card which identifies him as a civil engineering contractor. In one month he has already distributed 100 business cards that have the image of a house with a red roof. He gave my friend one and that’s how we met. I’m the first one who has dialled the number on the card.

Not everybody gets a business card. Two passengers in his cab were once discussing Thailand’s Tiger Temple. Coincidentally, Sakthivel had just read about it and when one of them said something inaccurate, he tried to correct her. You’re a driver, right? Focus on your job and drive, she replied in a tone that Sakthivel thought was unnecessarily rude. He’s the polite, soft-spoken sort. That day’s lesson: Eavesdropping is a cab-driver perk but never interrupt a conversation.

But rude passengers don’t faze him for too long. “I’m meeting so many different characters in this job. It’s a chance to people-watch and help me improve my character analysis skills,” he says.

If taxi aggregators such as Ola and Uber have improved the ease of our daily urban commute, they have, equally, influenced the lives of the male workforce who know how to drive. You’ve surely heard the stories of personal drivers who are quitting to be their own bosses and mid-level bank employees who are now cab drivers.

Statistically, Sakthivel is one of those Indians whose life has been irrevocably changed by the breakneck pace of development in the past 25 years. The construction boom in Bengaluru, now one of India’s fastest-growing cities, has ensured he always had enough opportunity to grow professionally. At a conference in October, speaker and Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy said Bengaluru has even overtaken Mumbai in the number of jobs created. In the last year, he said, the southern city had created 75,000 jobs, 95% of them with an annual salary of ₹ 2.5 lakh.

Sakthivel says that if the construction business revives, he will hire someone to drive the cab. Who knows, he might buy another car too, he adds.

Yet Sakthivel can’t understand what it is that I find so interesting about him. Why do I want to know his story? Why do I see him as a New India success story?

“My life is a failure,” he says quite matter-of-factly. “It’s only a zero. There’s nothing interesting. I’m 40 and alone.”

Sakthivel was married at 22 and divorced by 30. Some years later his second marriage, to a clinically depressed woman as he tells it, lasted 20 days. The divorce took three years and he decided he couldn’t try again. Then again: “You’re a journalist. You must be meeting lots of people. If you know anyone….” Recently he even called a local orphanage to say he was looking for a wife but when the lady at the other end of the phone line found out how old he was, all he got was a dressing down.

Sakthivel always believed that he would start his own company and make it big. “My dream was that I would get down from a car and people would be saluting me,” he says with a smile. He believes he could have made it happen if he had had the backing of a spouse. Statistics don’t always catch the twist in the tale.

Priya Ramani will share what’s making her feel angsty/agreeable every fortnight. She tweets at @priyaramani and posts on Instagram as babyjaanramani.

Also read | Priya’s previous Lounge columns.