Auto men in Chennai are very famous thanks to the antics they come up with. I have quite a few auto man stories and I was reminded of one that stripped me of my maanam . So during college days my college bus would drop me off at the main road near my house. Walking from bus stop to my house that was inside the streets would take at least ten, fifteen minutes. Some days I would just walk the distance but on lazy days I would take an auto. If I took an auto it would hardly take a couple of minutes to drop me off so I would want to pay ten rupees but some days,  persistent auto guys would ask for fifteen rupees.

So on one of my lazy days I took an auto. When I got down I handed the guy a ten rupee not. He looked at me like I was crazy and said no ten rupees, it’s twenty, lady. I was already on a short fuse that day and I blasted at him, “It hardly took two minutes to get here, indhe route nan daily varuven, twenty rupees too much, blah blah blah”. He listened to me patiently and said, “Ille ma twenty rupees dhan. Government has put new rule that minimum fare is twenty rupees. Nennege inniki paper padiklaya?”. He said that in such a condescending way! Me being the newspaper disciple that I am, that hurt my ego and I was like whoa, is he saying the truth? So I paid him the twenty rupees and ran home to grab The Hindu. I scanned every page for this piece of news. It wasn’t there.

And I was twenty rupees poorer.