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Biju Mathew has brought about change in the lot of the New York cabbie
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SO SAID cinema's most famous taxi driver, Robert De Niro, in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. While De Niro's Travis Bickle was as WASP as they come, 97 per cent of New York cabbies are third world immigrants with practically no rights. It took Hyderabad's Biju Mathew with 12 others to change things.
Mathew, a Nizamian, studied management in XLRI and worked as a corporate executive in Delhi. He did his PhD in Pittsburgh but chose to teach in a not so well known university where he works twice a week leaving the rest of the week free to pursue his passion. "I did not care too much about my career. Immigrant labour interests me," Mathew says. "Not much has been done in the field."
Tough break
The dice is heavily loaded against taxi drivers as Mathew explains, "a permit costs $ 350,000 - far out of the reach of an immigrant. The driver takes a single shift lease from the brokerage or garage for $ 120 and then there is $ 30 for gas. So the driver starts the day at minus $ 150." Biju joined "the New York Taxi Workers Alliance with Bhairavi Desai in 1996."
The Alliance went public in '98 with a strike call against Mayor Juliani's 17-rule package. After 9/11, taxi drivers were worst hit but they were not recompensed. The Federal Emergency Assistance Programme refused aid to taxi drivers on flimsy grounds but the bottom line was nobody really cared for the immigrant. We fought for and won aid for taxi drivers."
Mathew believes "the key pin for social transformation is through mass organisation. The anti-war movement is powered greatly by the radical immigrant. There has been a significant decline in mass movements over the world in the last twenty years. NGOisation is partly responsible for this, as NGOs do not pay any attention to the mass base. While NGOs have done a lot of positive work, it is a fact that a large part of Left politics has boiled down to NGOs."
Mathew should know being responsible for stopping funds to a right wing organisation. "A sizeable chunk of the money was coming from reputed companies in the US who had no idea the money was being used to fund the organisation."
New, new city
Mathew comes home to Hyderabad once a year and is struck by the changes in what he calls the "new, new city. The Punjagutta, Banjara Hills, Jubilee Hills stretch have changed dramatically. Larger areas remain unchanged. I stay in Chirag Ali Lane and that area has remained the same. The transformation of Hyderabad into global city has resulted in intolerance in attitude. I find a similarity between Chandrababu Naidu and Mayor Juliani as both modelled themselves as neo-liberal State executives. Both of them love to ride tight ships."
"Naidu took the particular past and identity of the city and built another city over it. He left the old city to decay and die."
"This speaks of arrogance - of a great deal of money backing such a project - this arrogance has percolated to the people who are enclosed in the `mall circuit.' Maybe Naidu was in a particular time and perhaps anyone else in that particular time would have done the same thing."
In the future
Mathew's future plans include the publication of his book Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York.
About bringing about change in Hyderabad, Mathew laughs and modestly says, "I am not big enough to say `this or that needs to be changed. There are many competent people doing lots of good work here. I would join them and help in whatever way I can." Till then in the words of another famous New Yorker, Billy Joel, Biju Mathew is in a New York State of Mind!
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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