Is That Brooklynese--Or Bengali?

Byline: Shashi Tharoor

Living in Manhattan, I long ago gave up my aspiration to own a car. Even if I could afford one, I could never park it in a city where garage space costs as much as a house in some American communities. So I take taxis everywhere.

It's the perfect solution. Taxis are plentiful and you don't have to look for a parking spot when they drop you. Sure, these are no longer the yellow cabs of New York legend, with their street-smart Irish drivers spouting wisecracks in Brooklyn accents while getting you to "toity-toid street" in a "Noo Yawk" minute. Nowadays the man behind the wheel (it's still very rarely a woman) is more likely to be a recent arrival from the Indian Subcontinent, or perhaps Haiti or West Africa, with an accent more Quetta than Queens. His unfamiliarity with street addresses is exceeded only by his disdain for basic rules of the road. He'll cut across three lanes of traffic to screech to a halt by your upraised hand; a yellow light is an incitement to accelerate. But so what if cabbies are careless when you're carless?

There was a time when taxis were relatively scarce, and many a tale was told of two strangers involuntarily sharing a cab that each was unwilling to concede to the other. Now taxis are ubiquitous, and the reason is simple: the immigrant cabbie. In the old days the New York cabbie owned his vehicle, went home for lunch and took the cab off the streets after an eight-hour day. But since 1979, owners have been allowed to lease out their cabs, and immigrants have poured into the breach. The same vehicle is now leased by two different cabbies each doing a 12-hour shift seven days a week; the number of cabs hasn't changed, but more are on the streets.

Ninety percent of New York's cabbies are foreign-born, and I'll bet many of the remaining 10 percent are Puerto Rican. The Taxi and ...