In Jackson Heights, Queens, AJ Gogia runs his cab driving school like a strict headmaster. His charisma has landed him in the year's most acclaimed documentary and brought offers for a reality TV show, which he rejected.

It's a few minutes before class time at AJ Yellow Taxi Tutors, and the late arrivals are straggling in. The shabby basement decor and the dozen or so people in their thirties and forties squeezed into grade school-style desk-chairs suggest a mid-day AA meeting, or a state-mandated road rage course. Yellowing posters of the five boroughs are stapled to the right wall, near a cloth-encircled photograph of the Dalai Lama. The men—and, with one exception, they are all men—sit quietly in the classroom's first four rows, scanning notes and checking phones.

Shortly after 11:30 am AJ Gogia bounds out of his doorless back office, clad on this fall Friday in a long-sleeved black t-shirt and blue jeans. Without any formal introduction, he starts redistricting.

"You speak Nepali, right?" he asks a student. "Come with me—we're going to put the Nepali brothers together."

Three minutes and much chair-scuffling later, the class has been divided into about a half-dozen pairs—Nepali speakers with Nepali speakers, Tibetan with Tibetan, Arabic with Arabic—at which point Gogia retreats back into his office. Small talk erupts in multiple tongues, and cuts off the instant Gogia re-enters the room. Really: it doesn't taper, doesn't dwindle—it just stops.