If you look hard enough, you can find anything in New York. So, for the lovelorn who are burned out by the bar scene, fed up with personal ads or tired of scouring the Internet, there’s another place to look for that perfect date – the back seat of a taxicab. Specifically, Ahmed Ibrahim’s cab.

The 50-year-old Egyptian immigrant sets up blind dates for his single passengers through a free, impromptu matchmaking service he runs out of his yellow cab. He said he finds mates, or at least dates, for about eight people a week.

“New York is a very tough city for dating,” Ibrahim mused while driving through the West Village recently. “I have heard a lot of crying in this cab, a lot of fighting and a lot of broken hearts.”

“Sometimes great people were just missing each other by minutes. One would get in my cab just as another had gotten out,” he said. Funny thing is, it works. Ask Natalie Dillon. She hopped into Ibrahim’s cab with friends on the way to a party one day in April 2004.

When their conversation switched to how hard it was to find a decent guy, Ibrahim chimed in through the bulletproof partition, “Hey ladies, I make matches.”

“He really got our attention when he said that,” Dillon said. “I was kind of sceptical at first but then I figured, ‘Oh, this is New York, what the hell.’ I figured he must meet a ton of people.”

So Dillon – a single, 33-year-old media studies graduate described what she was looking for in a guy, and gave Ibrahim her number. About six weeks later he called her and said, “Natalie, I have a guy for you.” “I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

She soon exchanged several phone calls with Martin Karamon, a 34-year-old lawyer. A few weeks later they went on a date. Six months later, the lovebirds are still going strong.

<B> >Source: Times of India</B></I>