In yet another incident to do with taxi aggregators, a Chennai-based publisher has alleged that a cab driver with Ola threatened to slit her throat after they got into an argument over the his rash driving.
The incident, first reported by The Hindu, took place on Sunday night when Vilasini Ramani's fiancé booked an Ola cab for her from Thiruvanmiyur to Valasaravakkam.
In a Facebook post, which has been widely shared, Vilasini recounted, "Instead of taking the cab directly from outside my home, I took it from a nearby shop. Once I sat in, the driver drove the car at top speed. I asked him to slow down because the speed made me carsick."
But, she says, he did not listen to her. "I yelled at him to go slower. He told me that customers should not treat drivers like this. He stopped the vehicle and said, 'Why don't you hail a bullock cart instead'."
The driver dropped her at Madhya Kailash around 10 pm and Vilasini gave him a bad rating. However, she felt scared when the car continued to stand a few metres away from her.
Vilasini then tried hailing an auto. "While I was negotiating with him (auto driver), I didn't realise that the cab driver had come next to me. He asked me, 'Who will pay?' I said it was bad driving and that he didn't listen to me. He gave me a dirty stare and said, 'I will slit your throat'. I immediately began checking whether he had any weapons with him at that moment. He then told me to do whatever I wanted to."
Her ordeal did not end there though.
She reached Nungambakkam and went to the police station. "Why are you filing a complaint in the Nungambakkam station when it happened in Guindy?" a police official asked her, she says. "I replied that I had nothing to do with Guindy and that the incident just happened to take place there. I was given a police escort along with the auto. No complaint was lodged."
The incident has left a deep impact on Vilasini. "I fear for the safety of this city, his words will always ring in my ears," she wrote.
Ola's "un-official" apology
In a new post uploaded on Tuesday, Vilasini said that a representative of Ola got in touch with her after the incident was reported about.
But their response came to her as a "complete disappointment".
"He (the representative) was, as a part of the ritual, continuously apologetic over phone but when I insisted that he should email me the course of action that Ola is intending to take against the criminal driver, he simply said no to that. He also added that he can only send me a 'generic email' but not a specific one addressing this issue when I insisted that as well. He apologized but didn't want to make it 'official'. The conversation was just futile adding agony to an already traumatic experience," she wrote.