Mumbai: Cab driver gives his customer a schooling on metal music

Video grab of the taxi driver, Dipesh Rasiklal Mistry

There are taxi rides, and then there is the taxi ride that city musician Arijit Datta took on Wednesday night. Datta was travelling from Kandivli to Andheri when he got stuck in traffic on the Western Express Highway. So, to while time away, he took out his phone and pressed play on an album, without his earphones on. And two bars into the first song, his driver turned to him and said, "Aap Metallica sun rahe ho?"

Heavy lessons
What followed was a conversation that went viral on social media after Datta posted it on his Facebook timeline. In it, Dipesh Rasiklal Mistry, the driver, gives his customer a schooling on metal music, waxing eloquent on bands as niche as Sacred Reich and Morbid Angels, leaving Datta feeling almost sheepish about his lack of knowledge in comparison. mid-day caught up with Mistry, and it turns out that the seeds of his interest in metal music were sown when he was aged around 15.

Arijit Datta, the customer

Back then, he chanced upon a person selling grey-market cassettes in the Fort area, and began collecting albums by bands like Sepultura and Slayer. His interest in the genre deepened when he was in college, and when MTV first entered the Indian market, around 1992.

Late night sessions
"They had a programme called Headbanger's Ball late at night that used to broadcast metal music, and I would record the songs on video cassettes, which I still have to this day," Mistry said.

All in the family
After college, though, his musical interests took a backseat when he joined the family business of manufacturing motherboards for computers. "But the business wound up around 2007. I then dabbled as a troubleshooter for computer hardware for a year or so. But the payments were erratic. So I gave it up, and took up a job driving tourists to outstation destinations. That went on for two years, and since I had gained practical experience, I then bought my own vehicle and signed up with Ola, because I felt that that would be more lucrative."

Asked whether he still listens to metal music, Mistry added, "What with being on the road for about 15 hours a day, I hardly get the time these days. But yes, whenever the mood strikes me, I switch on an album. But since I have my parents, kids and wife at home, I listen to it through my Philips headphones." And about going viral on social media, he said, "I don't really get what's happened. See, don't get me wrong, but I think that these things [Facebook, Instagram, etc] are for people who have free time on their hands, and that's not me," revealing, in a nutshell, how his philosophy in life remains distinctly metal.

15
No. of hours that Mistry spends on the road daily

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