Sadequl Bodruzzaman whips his taxi through the streets of Manhattan.
“Nobody likes the taxi driver,” he tells me on my way to LaGuardia Airport. “As a taxi driver, when I speak to somebody on the street, they mistreat me. It may be the police. It might be the city people. It may be the bike rider. It might be the private car driver. They misbehave. They don’t like the taxi driver.”
Bodruzzaman has turned 50 after arriving in New York from Bangladesh 15 years ago. There, he said, he had a respectable government job overseeing imports and exports.
He knows another man from Bangladesh who’d been an esteemed physician, but in New York City this Third World immigrant must quietly absorb the indignities that come with piloting a dinged-up yellow car.
“Taxi driver is not good job,” Bodruzzaman said. “Many cab drivers, immigrants. They cannot speak good English, so people are abusive to them. We become used to it. Sometimes, we keep patience. Sometimes we can not.”
Traders, brokers, deal-makers, analysts and executives wave down Bodruzzaman, screaming in English, irked that they have to suffer a cab because their financially troubled companies are no longer allowing them to book black cars and limos. As if only their dreams matter.
“Everybody run, run, run,” Bodruzzaman said. “Now, look, many of them lost their jobs.”
The recession has put a record number of cab drivers on the streets of New York as thousands of unemployed people chose “cabbie” as their new line of work. There are now more than 47,000 of them eating away at what seems a declining slice of fares in the Big Apple. There were 44,000 cabbies in 2005.
President Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may see glimmers of hope on our economic horizon, but this one Bangladeshi cab driver does not.
Bodruzzaman said he used to make as much as $250 a day. Now it’s more like $100, and the work days are often stretching to 12 hours, just to make that.
“Business is going down,” Bodruzzaman said. “It more harder, believe me. Yes. Harder means harder, believe me.”
And the new cab drivers flooding the streets often have no respect for the older cab drivers.
“Some taxi drivers are so lazy on the street,” Bodruzzaman said. “Some taxi drivers are older. They are like 65. So they are going slow. Younger taxi drivers are new and they don’t want to be very patient about that. So what happens? They honk each other. I myself honk, too. It’s New York City.”
Bodruzzaman said he used to dress in disposable, white garb to make semiconductor wafers at IBM Corp. in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
He quit that job years ago after buying a house in the Bronx at a foreclosure auction for “a very, very low price.” He then refinanced to buy a better home Queens.
All the while, he drove cabs. His wife of 25 years even toiled at McDonald’s, for a time. It was for their daughter, now 16 years old, to get the best education.
“I want her to be a doctor,” Bodruzzaman said. “But when she learned doctor takes almost 10 years to pass, she doesn’t want to go for that.”
Maybe she’ll be an attorney, or a computer engineer, or the daughter of a wealthy Internet entrepreneur.
“I have one last dream,” Bodruzzaman tells me. “My ultimate dream. Do you know ? Yes, the makeup company. Do you know how much they sell? Billions. Do you know ? They sell billions. Think about that. eBay? Billions, too. It could be a good business.”
Bodruzzaman said he’s using some of the money he earns driving a cab to hire a handful of engineers in Bangladesh to build an e-commerce website.
Turns out, he’s not just a cab driver. He’s the outsourcing president of , a home-based startup that aims to be a global, B2B supplier of everything from apparel to industrial supplies.
Bodruzzaman hopes to match buyers in the U.S. and Europe with sellers in far flung places such as Bangladesh, Brazil, India and Vietnam.
“I am very ambitious,” he said. “I want respect. It is very hard to get respect. And if I can make money, I can help society. I can help the people.”
Bodruzzaman’s declining income as a New York City taxi driver makes it harder to afford the engineers working on his website in Bangladesh. But he says that in the end, he will not be deterred:
“If I grow my business, I won’t have to drive a taxi anymore.”
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Al’s blog at .
