Skip to main content

The White Tiger

I read Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger this past weekend and absolutely loved it. The literary scene these days is dominated by one or two hit wonders - heavy-weights with real oeuvres to their credit are a thing of the past . With that, it has become increasingly harder to come by fiction that holds your attention and actually offers a refreshingly take on the human condition. Adiga offers generous portions of both in this book, his debut novel.

The bar for a desi author writing about India when being read by a desi reader is automatically set higher because the reader knows the score. Adiga's India and Indians are entirely believable which is more than what can be said about a lot of other books of this genre - namely contenders for the Great Indian Novel mantle.

Adiga is not subtle in taking on everything that defines India and telling it like it is - be it the mind boggling number of deities, secularism, marriage, family, casteism, bureaucracy, corruption, lawlessness, entrepreneurship, outsourcing - you name it, Balram Halwai has an opinion and more often than not it is not a politically correct one. Adiga's is a robust counterpoint to all the "India Shining" rhetoric and is one that would find favor with anyone who is skeptical about that "shine".

As a desi born and raised in India, some of the most memorable parts of The White Tiger include Balram's dread of indoor geckos, the concept of a half-baked person, the Rooster Coop and the Indian concept of entrepreneurship. Then are are gems of wisdom scattered through the book like this one :
One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.
Per Balram there are legions of half-baked people in India who end up the way they do because they never get an opportunity to complete their schooling. What's more, it takes such half-baked clay to make entrepreneurs.
- all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act and live with
I have not come across a better explanation of what ails our semi-literate and neo-literates masses.

I know a lot of desis including myself who are absolutely terrified of the indoor gecko - it is an irrational fear that just cannot be explained to those who do not have it. It is not surprising therefore that several desi writers have featured the gecko in their stories about India - in fact the description of a domestic scene would ring incomplete and untrue without one or more of them on the walls. That a close encounter with a gecko might alter the course of Balram's life is quite plausible.

As for his theory about Rooster Coop of Indian society - which is possibly the highest point of the novel, you must read the book. I would not be able do justice to Adiga's priceless metaphor in a blog post. In summary, this a book you don't want to miss and it reads at a terrific pace I might add.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques