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 7th 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
from Mumbai, Ernakulam, Hyderabad, and Kovalam, driving Scania, Mercedes, and
Volvo buses, 400-500 kilometers at a stretch, foregoing sleep and family.
Apparently, these drivers have to sign a contract that they would do night
shifts six months at a stretch, each year.
Tough though it was, he says he did it for the money & for his family. He saved up most of the Rs 3,600 per round
trip he made, to buy two plots of land @R180 psft, near what is now the hottest part of
Bangalore, right next to Manyata Tech Park, close to Hebbal, I
think a decade or more back. A couple of years later, he saved enough to construct a
single-storey, two-bedroomed house for self-use, in one plot, while he kept the other plot fallow to "sell it to fund his son’s ambition to
become either a doctor or an IAS officer". “Son”, Sudhakar proudly claimed, “is a first class first sir”. With obvious joy, he said that the current price of
Rs 7,000 to Rs 9,000 per sqft will easily fetch him Rs 4 crores, enough to take
care of his kid’s future, “wherever he wants to study, Sir!”
About two years back, Sudhakar decided that
the bus driver’s job was keeping him away from his family; he says that he was
home during the day, once every two days, only to eat & sleep, and was
missing out on his son’s growing years. So he chucked the job, and bought this
Toyota car "cash down”. He says he grosses ~Rs 80K a month, and nets close to
Rs 60K, enough to keep him happy and motivated. More importantly, he drives
back home every evening, and spends quality time with his family.
His son’s school and tuition costs him Rs
63K a year, and he has inculcated the savings habit in his kid. So every Monday
morning, when mum drops son off to school, they stop by at the local bank,
where the kid deposits his weekly Rs 210 pocket money into his own savings account.
Wow!
To say that I was truly impressed and humbled
by this guy is an understatement. His positive attitude was infectious, and his
commitment to secure his family’s future in simple ways was educative. And
he reinforced this belief that if you are humble, hard-working, and focused,
nothing is really impossible.
May his tribe increase.
Comments
waiting for a book from you Naresh.