Sadequl Bodruzzaman whips his taxi through the streets of Manhattan.
“Nobody likes the taxi driver,” he tells me. “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 don’t like the taxi driver.”
Bodruzzaman, 50, arrived in New York from Bangladesh 15 years ago. There, he said, he had a government job overseeing imports and exports.
He knows another man from Bangladesh who’d been a physician but in New York City must quietly absorb the indignities that come with piloting a dinged-up yellow car.
“Taxi driver is not good job,” Bodruzzaman said. “Many cabdrivers, immigrants. They cannot speak good English, so people are abusive to them.”
Traders, brokers, dealmakers, analysts and executives wave down Bodruzzaman, screaming in English, irked that they have to suffer a cab because their troubled companies no longer allow them to book black cars and limos. As if only their dreams matter.
President Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may see glimmers of hope on our economic horizon, but this one Bangladeshi cabdriver does not. Bodruzzaman said he used to make as much as $250 a day. Now it’s more like $100, and workdays stretch to 12 hours, just to make that.
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. He then refinanced to buy a better home in Queens.
All the while, he drove cabs. His wife 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 ? . . . 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 cabdriver. He’s the outsourcing president of , a startup that aims to be a global B2B supplier.
Bodruzzaman hopes to match buyers in the U.S. and Europe with sellers in 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 taxi driver makes it harder to afford the engineers working on his website. But he says 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 .
