A London taxi driver’s questions on India are as tough to digest as they’re to refute
Taxi drivers all over the place are mentioned to be founts of street-smart data. The purpose being that airport cabbies specifically meet folks from all walks of life and from the world over, gaining a broad perspective about international occasions.
This truism was introduced dwelling to me with a vengeance final week after I took a taxi trip from Central London to Heathrow.
The driver, a second-generation Bangladeshi Brit, ascertained I used to be from India and mentioned he labored for British Civil Service as an Immigration Officer, working as a contract cabbie on his off days. Preliminaries carried out with, he bought all the way down to brass tacks, and rarely have tacks been brassier.
Why, he requested me in the identical even tone, do folks kill folks in India only for consuming beef? I agreed that such prison acts had been certainly horrible. They are horrible, he mentioned. So why are they allowed to occur repeatedly? How can such issues be allowed to occur within the twenty first century?
And at the same time as Indians kill different Indians for consuming beef, India is the world’s largest exporter of cow hides and meat. Did I do know that? he queried.
People are killed in India as a result of they marry exterior their caste or faith, he continued. How can this occur in a rustic that sends rocket ships to the moon? he requested. He mentioned that he was Muslim, his Scottish-English spouse was Christian, and the one faith he taught his kids was to like all others, or a minimum of by no means to hate them.
He requested why, if India was the world’s fastest-growing financial system, round 30% of its inhabitants lacked fundamental sanitation. The British colonisers impoverished India? They left over 70 years in the past. What has India carried out for its poor since then?
He by no means raised his voice, was by no means lower than well mannered. And his questions had been all of the more practical for that.
One may dismiss him as a paranoid Islamist with leftist leanings. That can be straightforward. Far much less straightforward can be to try to see ourselves the best way others see us, taxi drivers and all.
Disclaimer
This article is meant to deliver a smile to your face. Any connection to occasions and characters in actual life is coincidental.
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