Vivek Renjen Bald's Taxi-vala/Auto-biography examines the difficulties faced by South Asian taxi drivers working in New, York City and depicts their hardships. entrapments and struggles through the first person narratives of the drivers themselves. The film, a product of a three-year effort by the California-born filmmaker, is vivid in its portrayal of the drivers' disillusionment and the embittered hopefulness that characterizes the South Asians drivers' community. One of the most salient, however, of the documentary's numerous facets is the half-Indian filmmaker's commentary on his own search for identity and desire for connections across the metaphorical plexiglass of the drivers' world, descending from a much-fantasized and profoundly distant shared homeland. The film is a portrayal of lives marked by difficult journeys -- those of the drivers from the subcontinent to a harsh New York and that of Bald from a lack of cultural fit to a more powerful, if not completely satisfying ethnic identity. Indeed, the documentary is one addressing commonality and exclusion -- and the profundity of isolation.

As revealed through Bald's interviews, the force drawing most drivers to the United Stales is the hope for an improved standard of living -- and this, coupled with severely limited opportunities and a virtual lack of a middle class back home, creates the dynamic of a material mission. Featured drivers speak of the returning heroes from America they had met in the subcontinent whose words and demeanor painted an image of a far off land of tremendous prosperity achieved with very little effort. Some sell everything they oven in order to buy their way to New York, leaving them with no other way back when miraculous America's seductive face begins to reveal great flaws. Through the desperate homesickness and sense of abandonment that comes with leaving one's family, the drivers plunge into the unknown with the burden of needing both to earn for themselves and to send back money to families left behind. One driver relates his inability to find work for months and another tells of his helpless state at JFK airport, unable to name any place in the city where he could even begin to search for a place to stay. Bald portrays the initiation of the typical South Asian driver in New York as painfully lonely and sometimes friendless.

Bald's interviews reveal the drivers' hardships in occupational life, and most strikingly, show numerous injustices faced by those South Asians operating yellow cabs. Firstly, the grueling ordeal of driving is characterized in the film as ceaseless and marked by engine fumes, instability, and a lack of personal and professional security. Tales told by those interviewed address incidents of verbal abuse and disrespect by passengers ("back to your own country"), and harassment by local police. One account is told of a driver, who attacked by five drunk white men, was charged by the police arriving on the scene when he was in fact a victim. Featured drivers describe a driver handcuffed for over twenty four hours and brought up on fake charges. Bald is careful not to generalize and depicts incidents of abuse as objectively as possible: he makes every effort not to distort the truth as told to him. Indeed, a portion of the film addresses the anti-Black racism present in some drivers' thinking, revealing that biases are present on both sides of the Plexiglass. Thus, though Bald shows sympathy towards the drivers, he does not glorify them or show them as flawless. Part of the film's impact stems from its honest depiction of complex experiences.

A remarkable aspect of the documentary is the filmmaker's extraordinary awareness of his own role and biases, as well as, his motives and goals. In Bald's ever-present narrative voice, "I can't escape that I'm part of the story." One of the film's most poignant moments is the tale of Bald's experience in a cab with a Pakistani driver to whom the filmmaker revealed that his mother was born in Lahore, only to meet non-acceptance and coldness from the nodding driver. Bald demonstrates a great deal of sophistication in his deliberate effort to avoid condescension or artificial identification. He speaks of his childhood's dreams of an exotic, magical India, existing as an antithesis and polar opposite of the America he wished to reject. Bald is able to recognize that he and the drivers, whose cause he strives to advocate, are buying into "two sides of the same myth," a magical Asia and a miracle America. Bald clearly sees that he has conveniently claimed to understand or belong to the South Asian drivers' community simply on the basis of his heredity. This awareness is impressive.

Ultimately, Taxi-vala is an enlightening look into the trials of lives that often go unmentioned after the fare is paid, and it is a laudable documentary because of its deliberate sincerity and effort not to romanticize or patronize. Whereas the advocate can easily fall into the trap of condescension and the filmmaker can exploit his position of authority behind the camera, Vivek Renjen Bald is careful to do neither. The documentary is an important one, for it demonstrates the need for a greater sense of community and collective interest among South Asian drivers. It is a film done with a purpose, self-awareness, and sincerity. Taxi-vala is a remarkable portrayal of the impossibility of capsulizing identity, as well as a depiction of the driver's lonely mission. It is a triumph of sophistication in the recognition of the very deep and very real complexities in the lives of South Asian drivers and the filmmaker himself. The result is as striking as those yellow vehicles on rain covered streets of black.

Aamir Rehman is a freshman at Harvard University.
Abdul Farooq Shahid works at a Mobil Gas Station in New York City.

(Reprinted from SAMAR Magazine, Summer 1995)