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Journalism of Courage
In a LinkedIn post that’s now gone viral, Bengaluru resident Chaarmikha Nagalla shared an unexpected and thought-provoking experience during a recent bike taxi ride. What started as a regular commute turned into a striking conversation when the rider greeted her with, “Am I audible?” — a phrase she called “the most corporate lingo” she’d ever heard from a cabbie.
Her curiosity piqued. Nagalla engaged him in a conversation and soon discovered that this wasn’t just any bike taxi rider — it was his first day on the job, and he was, in fact, a full-time employee at Infosys, working in their contract management team. He told her that he uses weekends and early mornings to earn a little extra cash and keep himself active, rather than “doom-scrolling” through social media.
Nagalla has recently taken to using bike taxis to beat Bengaluru’s notorious traffic, but even she didn’t expect a ride like this. She noted this wasn’t an isolated incident either. Just the previous evening, she hailed another Uber bike, only to find her rider was kitted out in premium gear. When she struck up a conversation, he revealed he worked at a B2B event management company and preferred giving someone a lift on his way home instead of riding alone. “Why drive alone from work to home? Might as well complete a ride and have some company,” he told her.
But beneath the surface of these stories, Nagalla raised a more serious concern: “While it’s great to see more people embracing gig work, I can’t help but wonder — is loneliness becoming an epidemic?” She reflected on a similar story that surfaced recently about a Microsoft employee who moonlighted as an auto driver, not for money, but to feel less alone. It made her question whether our culture of constant productivity is masking deeper emotional gaps.
Her post triggered a flurry of responses, with many echoing her sentiments. One user wrote, “Corporate culture sells us ‘productivity’ as virtue, but it’s often a distraction. The Microsoft employee driving an auto isn’t ‘optimizing weekends’. He’s outsourcing human connection to strangers in the backseat… We’ve normalized trading spreadsheets for small talk because our jobs no longer fulfill our deepest need — to belong.”
Another user said, “I am really not sure if we should cover loneliness by tagging it as ‘hustling’ though. The shift towards this is actually scary.” Yet others found the post both inspiring and sobering, calling it a “thought-provoking look at modern life in urban India.”
In a city like Bengaluru, where tech and hustle are part of daily life, it seems every ride might come with a story — and maybe, a question about what we’re all really looking for.
