When Ja Rule helped me break the ice!
On a dreary, stressful weekday night, I finished work at the ungodly hour of 3am. You must be thinking — which godforsaken company is this?; 3 am is no time to come back home; must be a tech company. Well I would love to tell you all about it but that is a story for another day!
I usually walk back from work but never after 9pm. Even a first world city like Seattle has it’s fair share of crime and I don’t want to take the risk. So I summoned Uber to ferry me home.
The range of colorful Uber drivers I have met over the years is staggering. The variety of their personalities and of the cars they drive tells a unique story about who they are.
The most inconsiderate ones would often play loud music in their non-English native language. It’s one thing to be proud of your roots but another thing to forcefully impose it on someone else.
One of them even had a large screen, as big as a small TV, mounted on the dashboard. The music was very loud and he never once asked for permission to play it that loud. Thankfully the drive was short.
If you observe closely enough, you get clues to form a quick mental picture of the guy driving the Uber. Granted, some part of the story your mind conjures up is genuine intuition and the rest is just stereotyping.
I was also guilty of some of this mental stereotyping on that dreadful night when I got into the Uber at 3am.
But then the guy who picked me up was super grumpy and how.
He was an African American male in his late 40’s. I say grumpy because every Uber driver I have met has always confirmed my first name and most of them have at least said hello.
This guy did not confirm my first name before I got in, did not bother to say hello or even acknowledge my presence in his car. Now this could be a figment of my imagination but I started thinking that he might be biased too and maybe he too had a stereotypical image of me.
Maybe he had had some poor past experiences interacting with other Indian passengers and he was judging me through the same lens. I also thought that maybe I am thinking too much here.
I further ruminated that maybe the guys is just having a bad night. Maybe he is going through a bad phase in life. Whatever it was, the guy looked angry and upset.
Now, I pride myself on being a really good driver. And if you are a good driver, you can sense another driver’s expertise just by riding shotgun for a few minutes. This guy was not a good driver. Moreover, I could feel that he was driving angry which scared me a little.
But what does all of this have to do with Ja Rule!
Well, all through the drive he was listening to music but thankfully unlike some of the other obnoxious drivers I had met in the past, this guy was playing music in English and that too at a low and much more comfortable volume. What he was listening to was 90s and early 2000s rap music.
Now I started thinking that if he was indeed stereotyping me as another Indian techie immigrant unknown to the music scene in US, there is no way he could imagine that I would have any idea what the music was.
Well, I sure did!
Even though I grew up in India, I grew up listening to this very music genre. The selection was limited but I was very familiar with 90s and 2000s hip hop stars: Tupac, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Ashanti, Mary J. Blige, Nelly etc.
At the start of the ride, I was a little annoyed and also slightly intimidated at getting the cold shoulder but then I thought, whats the point of harboring these ill feelings.
Whatever this guy’s reasons are, it can’t be easy for him driving for Uber at 3am in the morning. I can hardly expect him to be chirpy and interactive.
We were coming close to the end of the ride. The song “Rainy Dayz” started playing on his car radio. And I had an idea.
I immediately asked him, “hey, is that Ja Rule?”.
That. Was. It!
I think that just flipped a switch in him.
I could see from the rear view mirror that he flashed the biggest smile on his face. He acknowledged in the warmest tone possible , “yeah, that is Ja Rule brother!”.
Brother! Are you kidding me? I couldn’t believe it. He went from being a grumpy, angry Uber driver who did not even acknowledge my presence to calling me brother.
I said “that is a nice song, is that Ashanti with him?” and he promptly corrected me that it was in fact Mary J. Blige.
The ride ended within a couple of minutes of that conversation. But I could see from his face, he felt a lot more relaxed.
Maybe his stereotypical image of Indians in US was broken. Maybe the our encounter just broke the mundane night driving.
Whatever it was, the experience left both of us feeling a little warm and fuzzy.
He had the biggest good night greeting for me, “take care brother and have a good night”. I could feel that he was almost apologizing, without saying the words, for being quietly rude to me at the beginning of the ride.
I could have walked away from the ride thinking what a rude driver he was and could have rated him poorly but what purpose would it have served. I was happy that I ignored my annoyance, intimidation and stereotypical thoughts and at least attempted to connect with him.
I will never forget this chance interaction. Stories like these make you forget the everyday struggles of life. I will also never forget his grumpy and then beaming face.
Especially in these strange times of shelter-in-place orders, it makes me realize that we are all connected. Whether it’s music, food, arts or other shared experiences, there is always some thread that connects us all.
You just have to make an effort to find it.
Sadly, the thread that is connecting the world right now is this tiny virus that has stopped the world from spinning, all in a span of 3 months! It has forced everyone to sit at home and for a change not feel guilty of being at home for so long.
While this forced stay-cation has given peace to a lot of folks, it has unfortunately come at the cost of almost 60,000 souls (at the time of writing) whom we have devastatingly lost to this ominous virus.
I shudder sometimes at the helplessness of the world leaders in dealing with this disease. If we can’t defend ourselves against such a tiny virus what will we do if aliens attacked us today.
What if they didn’t use their fancy laser beams but just introduced another potent virus.
I certainly hope they are not watching.
But we will burn that bridge when we get to it.
For now we can all listen to some Ja Rule and remember that we are all connected.
Just like that Uber driver who will never forget the Indian techie who sat in his ride at 3am and who knew about Ja Rule!