By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

There is something profoundly democratic about hailing a cab through an app. You open it with great optimism, as if you are about to solve a complex equation. The app responds by showing you seventeen drivers, all of them suspiciously close, all moving in directions that have nothing to do with you.

You compare prices across three apps with the seriousness of a stock market analyst. One says seven hundred and forty rupees. Another says seven hundred and ten. However, one more app speaks about being driver-friendly. You appreciate this philosophically. However, you cannot afford it emotionally when your flight is in ninety minutes. You choose the cheapest one, feel briefly virtuous and press confirm.

Then the driver cancels.

Not immediately. That would be too merciful. He waits. He lets the little car icon do a peculiar dance on your screen, circling your location like a confused moth around a streetlamp. Then it quietly, almost elegantly, vanishes from your life. No explanation. No apology. Just gone. You stare at the screen wondering what you did wrong. These are questions that neither artificial intelligence nor any large language model has yet learned to answer.

You try another driver. He accepts. You exhale. You watch him approach on the map. He is four minutes away. Then five. Then six. The map insists he is moving, but the map, like many optimists, is not entirely in touch with ground reality. He arrives. You get in. And that is when the education begins.

The driver is on a call. Not a quick call. Not a wrapping-up call. A call that has clearly been going on since morning and has no intention of concluding before evening. You learn, within the first two minutes, that someone named Raju has behaved badly, that diesel prices are a personal affront to all of humanity and that his cousin’s wedding in Aurangabad next month is both exciting and logistically complicated. You did not ask for any of this. You are grateful for all of it.

Because this is where the real India lives. Not in policy documents. Not in impact assessments. Not in the beautifully formatted dashboards that development organisations produce to show that things are improving. It lives in this car, smelling faintly of a pine air freshener that has long given up, hurtling down a road that the driver knows better than any GPS ever will, while a man talks to his friend, drives and thinks about Raju and diesel and Aurangabad all at once.

You ask him a question, in Kannada and he responds in a language that is a brave and original fusion of Kannada, Hindi and something entirely his own. You understand perhaps forty percent of it. That forty percent tells you everything. He came from a village near Solapur seven years ago. He works fourteen hours a day. He has two children. His wife manages everything at home with a competence he describes with a mixture of admiration and mild bewilderment. He sends money every month. He worries every month. He drives every day. This is not a story about poverty. This is a story about endurance.

You reach the airport. The app tells you the payment is complete. You feel that brief, modern satisfaction of having paid without actually doing anything. The driver looks at you expectantly and mentions UPI. There is a silence in which both of you understand that the relationship between what the app says and what actually happened is, at best, approximate. You open your phone and pay again. Or perhaps for the first time. Nobody is entirely sure.

Then comes the rating. Four stars or five? The driver was courteous, despite the unending phone call. He got you there on time, despite the map’s early confusion. He told you more about real life in twenty minutes than most panel discussions manage in two hours. But the car had a seatbelt on the passenger side that had retired from active duty sometime around 2019. The silencer expressed itself freely and often. There was a crack in the windshield addressed with optimism and transparent tape. You give him five stars, mention the car separately and feel you have been fair and humane and appropriately nuanced.

As you walk into the terminal, you think about all the talk around artificial intelligence transforming transportation, predicting behaviour, optimising routes, personalising experience. And you smile. Because no algorithm predicted that you would learn today about Raju’s betrayal or feel unexpectedly moved by the story of a man raising his family across a distance of eight hundred kilometres or find yourself rating a human being on a scale of one to five while privately acknowledging that the scale is entirely inadequate.

Some last miles, it turns out, can only be covered by being human.

The app will keep improving. The cars may get cleaner. The seatbelts will hopefully return to duty. But the driver, with his stories and his phone calls and his fourteen-hour days, will remain the most sophisticated intelligence on that road. For now, at least, he is irreplaceable. And that, perhaps, is the most reassuring thing any of us will learn today.

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]