Conclusive, blurry evidence that there is a man named Balwinder Singh driving a cab in New York City, and I am not a liar. In this case. Props to Mike Sebba for the photo.
A year ago at this time, I was a tutor for prep school kids in New York City. In that capacity I took a lot of cabs around the Upper East Side, and one night I found myself conducted down Fifth Avenue by a man named Balwinder Singh. In New York, unusual cab driver names are something of a collector’s item. You can tell the people who just moved to the city, because they will sit down at the bar and excitedly tell you that they were just driven there by Muhammad Ali—not realizing that Muhammad Ali is the Harry Johnson of New York cab driver names: kind of funny, yes, but also too common to remark upon. After you’ve lived there for a few years, Muhammad Ali becomes just another fixture in the background of the city, like the Empire State Building or human suffering. To impress the true connoisseur of foreign cabbie names, you need something genuinely weird—like a Sherpa Sherpa, say, or a 45 year-old man named “Ball-winder,” who has unwittingly immigrated to a country where that is completely hilarious.