I saw an interview with the CEO of Uber, the trillion-dollar worth taxi service app that’s changing the world. One would think his ambitions would be taxi-related. That he’d want the whole world to stop a well-worn 20th century tradition, that of hailing a taxi, right hand in the air (or in India, just shouting ‘Taskiii’. In New York City, shouting, “Oh, you a axxxhole” to the man who beat you to it) and replace it with a digital swipe on a square on an iPhone.
They are not.
His ambition is doing away with the idea of car ownership completely. And eventually, getting the human race to re-evaluate the idea of ownership. You read that right. The entire human race re-looking at what and how they buy stuff. His point is that in a regular life, a regular middle-class human being not born into the last names Jobs, Trump, Ambani, Slim, Kai Shing, the biggest expense of one’s life would be a home loan and a car loan. His question is, “Why?” Why not spend the money living in Cape Town for a year or buy a café in Goa? It is perhaps no different from Mr Ford asking at the turn of the last century, “You know those wheels on the carriage that are pulled by horses, why horses? Why not an engine?” Financiers are always looking at scalable business models. It doesn’t get any more scalable than everyone in the whole world saying, “Let’s not buy a car and a home.” Sounds like a modest relaxed ambition.
Racing with spinach farmers
Recently, in Lower Parel, a busy business district in Mumbai, transforming from textile mill compounds of the 1980s to glass and steel office towers that are faux Dubai/ Singapore, a young man, the sort you expect owns a brewery that hosts an ironic disco night, revved up his yellow Lamborghini and sped a cumulative three seconds to be blocked by traffic and a religious festival. Street vendors carrying swathes of spinach passed him in a heart-breaking display of what happens when you take the world’s fastest sports car and put it in the chaos of an Indian vegetable market. Which also, naturally, is a main thoroughfare for major vehicles.
As he waited, it was clear that the day he’d long waited for to show off of his new million-dollar vehicle on the city streets had become one where he festered inside it, for hours, trying to look away from the smirking spinach farmers and into his dying iPhone, bathed in embarrassment. I imagine the brave new Uber world is for people like him. When stuck in traffic the next time, he can justify it by saying, “At least I didn’t have to buy the car.”
A friend who works for an ad agency explained. “You see all these car ads on Indian TV, people driving by the open sea on a wide stretch of mountain road, none of them are shot here. Most are Malaysia or Turkey or Mauritius. Abroad, when they do these ‘enjoy the open road’ ads, there’s some place in that country you can do that. Here, you’ll always be behind three autos with a screaming mother-in-law. Late for everything. Or when you hit the highway, you’ll be behind 11 Bharat Petroleum trucks. No one wants to see that.”
Competing with Atlanta housewives
Which is perhaps why young clever cynical people who now come attached with the iPhone 5S, or are born in the Apple store, are saying, “Um. No Lamborghini ambition, thanks.”
With things like Uber saying, “Listen if a housewife has some spare time in Atlanta after dropping her son to school, why can’t she can become a taxi?” or Mypeon in India saying, “Look, do you really need a full-time errands person or just get one for specific errands who can do other people’s stuff as well” or AirBNB saying, “Going to London for three weeks? Hotels are very 20th century. There’s this guy with a sofa. Or even better, he’s coming to Delhi for a month, just exchange apartments”, the idea of sharing is the 21st century’s big economic revolution.
An Uber driver I had in San Francisco was a part-time gymnast (and drove like it). In India, it is mostly the former Innova tourist vehicles. One driver had made so much money that he had his own driver. He complained that having one’s own driver just led to tantrums, and he always asked for money etc. Listening to this from my driver, it became all quite meta.
Ultimate transparency
As a friend who runs an NGO explained, “It is the next level of thousands of people sharing a torrent file of the new Game Of Thrones, it is sharing everything. Buyer-seller equal and ultimate transparency. If you stay at an AirBNB place, people rate you. If you take an Uber, as a customer people rate you. So if you have a high nice rating, people want you. Bad day in the 20th century, shout at a cab, get off, go live your life. You call a cab driver an axxhole in the 21st century, it stays forever, in every city you may go ever after, you could be standing on the road a real long time.”
Naturally, all revolutions take time, so will sharing. Various taxi unions are staging protests. In London, the infamous London black cabs all lined up in a very Kolkata/Paris type strike. In the US, they are lobbying to pass legislation saying the American housewife cannot also become the Sudanese taxi driver. In India, the Reserve Bank said Uber cannot take electronic payments the way they do. I’m sure someone’s maid will punch someone from Mypeon. New York City legislators, whose politics sometimes make the Mumbai municipal corporation look like Mother Teresa’s helpers, are trying to make AirBNB hosts’ criminals under some archaic squatting law.
I’m not sure what this means for human emotions and whether the next big thing after this thing would be sharing love. There are already enough complaints about men seeing relationships as ownership and how that bothers their partners/wives/ girlfriends/ boyfriends. I am hoping the next iteration of Uber is not Lover. Or perhaps I’m too 20th century
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They are not.
His ambition is doing away with the idea of car ownership completely. And eventually, getting the human race to re-evaluate the idea of ownership. You read that right. The entire human race re-looking at what and how they buy stuff. His point is that in a regular life, a regular middle-class human being not born into the last names Jobs, Trump, Ambani, Slim, Kai Shing, the biggest expense of one’s life would be a home loan and a car loan. His question is, “Why?” Why not spend the money living in Cape Town for a year or buy a café in Goa? It is perhaps no different from Mr Ford asking at the turn of the last century, “You know those wheels on the carriage that are pulled by horses, why horses? Why not an engine?” Financiers are always looking at scalable business models. It doesn’t get any more scalable than everyone in the whole world saying, “Let’s not buy a car and a home.” Sounds like a modest relaxed ambition.
Racing with spinach farmers
Recently, in Lower Parel, a busy business district in Mumbai, transforming from textile mill compounds of the 1980s to glass and steel office towers that are faux Dubai/ Singapore, a young man, the sort you expect owns a brewery that hosts an ironic disco night, revved up his yellow Lamborghini and sped a cumulative three seconds to be blocked by traffic and a religious festival. Street vendors carrying swathes of spinach passed him in a heart-breaking display of what happens when you take the world’s fastest sports car and put it in the chaos of an Indian vegetable market. Which also, naturally, is a main thoroughfare for major vehicles.
As he waited, it was clear that the day he’d long waited for to show off of his new million-dollar vehicle on the city streets had become one where he festered inside it, for hours, trying to look away from the smirking spinach farmers and into his dying iPhone, bathed in embarrassment. I imagine the brave new Uber world is for people like him. When stuck in traffic the next time, he can justify it by saying, “At least I didn’t have to buy the car.”
A friend who works for an ad agency explained. “You see all these car ads on Indian TV, people driving by the open sea on a wide stretch of mountain road, none of them are shot here. Most are Malaysia or Turkey or Mauritius. Abroad, when they do these ‘enjoy the open road’ ads, there’s some place in that country you can do that. Here, you’ll always be behind three autos with a screaming mother-in-law. Late for everything. Or when you hit the highway, you’ll be behind 11 Bharat Petroleum trucks. No one wants to see that.”
Competing with Atlanta housewives
Which is perhaps why young clever cynical people who now come attached with the iPhone 5S, or are born in the Apple store, are saying, “Um. No Lamborghini ambition, thanks.”
With things like Uber saying, “Listen if a housewife has some spare time in Atlanta after dropping her son to school, why can’t she can become a taxi?” or Mypeon in India saying, “Look, do you really need a full-time errands person or just get one for specific errands who can do other people’s stuff as well” or AirBNB saying, “Going to London for three weeks? Hotels are very 20th century. There’s this guy with a sofa. Or even better, he’s coming to Delhi for a month, just exchange apartments”, the idea of sharing is the 21st century’s big economic revolution.
An Uber driver I had in San Francisco was a part-time gymnast (and drove like it). In India, it is mostly the former Innova tourist vehicles. One driver had made so much money that he had his own driver. He complained that having one’s own driver just led to tantrums, and he always asked for money etc. Listening to this from my driver, it became all quite meta.
Ultimate transparency
As a friend who runs an NGO explained, “It is the next level of thousands of people sharing a torrent file of the new Game Of Thrones, it is sharing everything. Buyer-seller equal and ultimate transparency. If you stay at an AirBNB place, people rate you. If you take an Uber, as a customer people rate you. So if you have a high nice rating, people want you. Bad day in the 20th century, shout at a cab, get off, go live your life. You call a cab driver an axxhole in the 21st century, it stays forever, in every city you may go ever after, you could be standing on the road a real long time.”
Naturally, all revolutions take time, so will sharing. Various taxi unions are staging protests. In London, the infamous London black cabs all lined up in a very Kolkata/Paris type strike. In the US, they are lobbying to pass legislation saying the American housewife cannot also become the Sudanese taxi driver. In India, the Reserve Bank said Uber cannot take electronic payments the way they do. I’m sure someone’s maid will punch someone from Mypeon. New York City legislators, whose politics sometimes make the Mumbai municipal corporation look like Mother Teresa’s helpers, are trying to make AirBNB hosts’ criminals under some archaic squatting law.
I’m not sure what this means for human emotions and whether the next big thing after this thing would be sharing love. There are already enough complaints about men seeing relationships as ownership and how that bothers their partners/wives/ girlfriends/ boyfriends. I am hoping the next iteration of Uber is not Lover. Or perhaps I’m too 20th century
