Driving change

Families that hire drivers have now shifted gears.

Technology has changed the way we hire drivers. Photo: R. Ravindran

We’ve changed. If you pay attention to how we choose our drivers, you’ll know how much.

In the past, a driver would be grafted into the family. He would be privy to major decisions. Sometimes, he would be a keeper of secrets.

In the Tamil film

Azhagan , released in 1991, Mammootty plays Azhagappan, a high-flying entrepreneur and a widower with four adopted children. The adoption is a secret, known only to Azhagappan’s faithful driver. Even the children are not aware of it. When the film races towards its denouement and the children display a stubbornness that lacerates Azhagappan’s heart, the loyal driver blurts out the truth to the children in a fit of anger. The characterisation of this driver is a case of fiction imitating reality.

The point is: a driver invariably stayed with a family for the entire duration of his working career. In some cases, all his life. Or, long enough to be acquainted with the family’s ethos and its deepest sorrows and joys. The children would see an avuncular figure in the driver. When the children grew up, their parents would ask him to keep tabs on them. The driver would double as an odd jobs man, carrying out a diversity of chores. It was blatant exploitation of labour: but that’s how we were.

Of course, there would be reports of drivers betraying trust, but we tended to ignore these cases, dismissing them as the small black dot on the paper and choosing to focus on the vast expanse of white around it.

In what strikes me as ironical, people invited drivers into their garages and often the inner chambers of their lives, with the minimum of background checks. Drivers were hired on the basis of a good report provided by a neighbour, a domestic help or the owner of a petty shop round the corner. In most cases, the recommended driver would be living in the same locality or in an area proximate to it. There would be no inspection of documents to lay bare his antecedents. Even his driver’s licence would remain unchecked.

We did not realise the need to do the right thing: thorough background checking, which is something we now do in spades. There are various reasons for our justified cautiousness now. One, reports of drivers involved in crime are more frequent. Here is a plausible explanation. There are more cars, more car users and therefore more drivers; and there are more media instruments to report such crimes.

Two, our connection with our neighbours — for that matter, even with our neighbourhood — is so tenuous that we can not turn to them for guidance. It is five years since we moved to Sholinganallur, located on what is called the information technology corridor of Chennai, and there is not one neighbour we relate to on a first-name basis. The majority of our neighbours, especially the young techies, might be just like us, divorced from the social realities of the neighbourhood and therefore unable to help us with an honest name for a driver’s job. Three, in our times, technology has overturned our concept of neighbours. Connectivity, not proximity, decides neighbours. When ‘mbps’ can find us everything, do we need neighbours to find us drivers?

Technology is increasing our reliance on service providers with an online presence, which includes those that could connect us with drivers looking for full-time employment. A thorough background check is part of the deal we strike with the agency. There is also a growing shift from full-time to part-time employment of drivers. Any number of agencies provide drivers-on-call services and we trust them to have the antecedents of the drivers on their roll, checked.

We have changed, haven’t we?