Kaali Peelis get a podcast

As Fiat taxis phase out of Mumbai streets, an urban ethnographer is podcasting their drivers on Indibloggies-winner Meter Down

The sofas at her Bandra bungalow are encased in a floral taxi-decor plastic sheet. Her standard gift to close friends is a steering wheel wrapped in fluorescent nylon rope, with patterns made of radium underneath.

Sometimes, taxiphile Kabi S uses rearview mirrors and photos of cabbies' eyes to make "gaze pieces".

"Taxi drivers write the city -- they move through its streets and collect its stories. Buildings rise up, mills die and whole sections of neighbourhoods disappear. Roads get widened, flyovers are built, people shift further north, or east. They experience the absence of the old. Yet, they are also the subjects of these changes," says the spunky urban ethnographer whose fascination with Mumbai's kaali peelis led to Meter Down (meterdown.wordpress.com) in "707" (July 2007), which won the award for Best Indi Podcast on annual weblog award site Indibloggies.

Kaali peeli ki kahani
"As part of a larger project on Bombay taxi drivers (kaali-peeli ki kahani), I began recording conversations with cab drivers, as we rode through the city. I podcast these conversations as episodes on Meter Down," says Kabi, who is country representative for a non-profit that implements CSR projects. Despite her foreign roots -- Kabi is an American living in Mumbai for the last 16 years -- our cabbies couldn't have found a better messenger for the classes. She drove cabs by nights for three years in Los Angeles. "Though I had lived in LA for years, it wasn't until I rode through the night streets of that far-flung city that I got to know layers that lie beneath everyday life." Before that, Kabi was counselor at a feminist clinic, investigative reporter for a TV station, a machinist, house painter, community organiser and IT systems engineer. "My last IT job brought me to Mumbai, and I fell in love with it."

Human stories
Kabi considers the Meter Down project an oral history, a verbal record that explores the questions of migration and mulak, Mumbai and change, taxi driving and life. "The cabbies, of course, also tell some wonderful stories."

Like Mohammad Mustaqeen Khan who came here from Uttar Pradesh as a strong 20 year-old. Khan started out pulling haath gaadis at Do Tanki in Chor Bazaar. Twenty-six years later he has bought more land, rebuilt his home, married off four children, all from driving a taxi. The hour-long conversations edited down to 25-30 minute podcasts lend a back-story, humanness and dignity to the faceless cabbies who drive the city's thousands to work and back.

"A majority of the drivers are migrants like me, each with his own sense of home," says Kabi, who is fascinated by this internal migration.

Taxi art
The blog also has photos of drivers and their taxis. Kabi has also posted outtakes of some of the conversations for listener convenience. The project includes documenting and photographing the personal and creative designs that cab drivers employ to make each taxi a signifier of the self: words on the back windows that act like clues, rexine mudflaps, mirrored ceilings, patterned seat-covers, radium patterning and painted mechanical meters. "I print these images to fabric and create textile pieces," says Kabi. "But it is the podcasts that are the ballast; give them a listen."

Subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes or listen to Kabi's conversations with cabbies on meterdown.wordpress.com

First auto rickshaw mag
Meter Down is also, coincidentally, India's first auto-rickshaw magazine. Launched this March, the 24-page general interest monthly magazine will be placed inside rickshaws for passengers to read, free of cost. Starting with autos plying from Bandra to Goregaon, with a print run of 300, the magazine will feature a mix of travel, entrepreneurship, lifestyle and fashion.

Says founder Mulchand Dedhia, "Since a wide variety of people travel by auto rickshaws, the magazine has something interesting to offer to everyone."