Chennai: A month after coming out of jail for allegedly threatening a woman passenger, a 29-year-old BA English graduate call taxi driver became the proud owner of a brand new car on Thursday.
For this, he owes a debt of gratitude to the Tamil writer cum blogger Vimaladithya Mamallan, who believed that the complaint of the woman was exaggerated and he went on to collect Rs .2.41 lakh from followers of his blog after he told the real story in his blog of the driver’s predicament.
The car, a Toyota Liva, was purchased with the money collected as down payment. The driver will run his car as a taxi, generate money and pay the rest of the EMIs, Mamallan told this newspaper. The Ola call taxi services had dropped the driver from its cluster, which is when Mamallan decided to help him to buy a car with the money he had collected.
Recalling the incident, which happened on the night of July 9, the driver had said that he never threatened the customer and that he only asked for payment for the ride.
The incident happened when a woman passenger was travelling from Thiruvanmiyur to Valsaravakkam. “She stopped the car in between citing overspeeding. She got down and took an auto but never paid me,” said the call taxi driver, a resident of Mudichur.
Later the woman passenger accused the driver in her FB post of threatening to kill her. Following a newspaper report based on this, the police arrested him on July 14 for criminal intimidation.
Though the woman passenger Vilasini Ramani ’s account created a ripple in the social media, Mamallan’s blog with the story telling the story from the side of the call taxi driver, triggered greater sympathy for his plight and saw financial aid pour in for him.
According to the driver, he had let the issue rest when his passenger refused to pay and got into an auto rickshaw. “I said that my family was not going to slash my neck if I had failed to collect payment from one customer. Her auto was already moving and it is possible that she never heard me properly,” he had told this newspaper.
The driver had then to go from near Anna University to Little Mount to pick up another customer. So he ended up following the auto of the woman passenger who was going to Virugambakkam. This may have led to her to believe he was following her, the driver said.
