Recently, I've come across many articles about the Indian Driver, the loneliness, the monotony. It's a waiting game for them: waiting for fares, waiting for customers, waiting for hours on end sometimes. I guess it's 'worth' it if these drivers are waiting for a paying fare, but what in the world would YOU do all day if you had to wait for someone for 8 hours? I'd take on extra fares, but that can go terribly wrong if your paying fare decides to call you early. Personally, I'd go crazy if I had to wait around for someone, doing absolutely nothing. The lack of brain stimulus would do me in.
However, long waits are at least paid waits, and this is much preferable to scrambling for fares, competing with other drivers, but not too much to drive down the cost of the fare (if the customer isn't crafty enough to get the meter price). Auto and taxi drivers will even offer to 'wait for free' when they're having slow days.
And it's exactly this waiting that blows my mind, or rather the significance of this waiting: time is cheap. Of course, not everyone's time is cheap in India, but for these drivers, it's their most abundant resource. True, time is not limitless, but in a day, a driver has 24 hours, which he doesn't have to pay for, meaning the cost of going 20km in 30 minutes versus a period over 4 hours remains nearly the same when there isn't any potential for other fares.
Oh drivers...
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