The report on my twenty-four hour whirlwind trip to Chennai this weekend can wait. But I must tell you about the cabbie that dropped me off home from Cantonment Railway Station late last night. Cheerful Sudhakar Shanthakumar got chatty no sooner I hopped into his Toyota Etios cab outside the noisy & chaotic station. After the usual conversation starter “Aiyoo…baala traffic saar illi, parking maddakkey kooda kashta..”, we got talking about his car, his profession, his family, and life in general. When I eventually hopped off sixteen kilometres, and forty minutes later, close to midnight, I walked out shaking hands with a winner. Sudhakar is 41 years old, has a teacher for a wife, and a son who is a 7 th grader at Baldwin High near Hennur. Coming from a pretty poor background, he proudly claimed that he was self-made. With nothing more than a commercial driver’s license as his asset, he became a long-distance bus driver for nearly a dozen years, ferrying passengers to and