The White Tiger

The White Tiger, a review

Very rarely, in recent years, have I sat through and read a book from cover to cover, at one sitting...yesterday evening, around 5pm, I took up Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger"...I had seen the book in India, read reviews and yesterday discovered that beti pyaari had picked up a copy...

Started reading it with the usual scepticism.. .however, as the pages passed, it gripped me...sat till around 10pm reading the book before I nodded off...given the fact that by 10pm I have generally been asleep for about two hours, this should give you an indicator of how I was absorbed...finished the 250+ pages of the book this afternoon...

The fact that I have just returned from India, and, this book is all about what is happening within India perhaps made it so immediately absorbing... and then, a lot of the book is set in Gurgaon and I had just been in Gurgaon, and, could relate to all that was being said...I could recognize the malls and the Buckingham and Windsor mansions...this book gives one dimension of the changing face of India...or, in reality, is there a change at all, or, have just the players and the stage changed ?

The irreverence of the book was what held my attention to begin with...the writer describes Krishna (of the Bhagavad Gita fame) as one more chauffeur... and the descriptions of the filth of the Ganges...the book ends with the same irreverence where the protagonist hopes to found a 'good' school where children will not have to learn about God and Gandhi...

For the last eight years, ever since the call center revolution I have been travelling to India once or so a year...I have also sat listening to my North American friends returning and telling me how India is booming...Diet Pepsi and Kit Kat being freely available being the yardstick of such prosperity.. .I have always felt a nagging feeling of discomfort.. .Aravind Adiga draws a clear picture of this discomfort through the letters that his protagonist, Balram Halwai writes to the Chinese Prime Minister...

There is a brutality to poverty that is difficult to accept...it is different from the pictures of westerners adopting chubby orphans through World Vision...that brutality comes through loud and clear in cockroach infested servants quarters of Buckingham Apartments that Balram lives in...it comes through in the 'ammonia' smell of parking lots where drivers have to wait and urinate as they wait for their masters and mistresses to come back from late night parties...and more than anything else the principle of the Rooster Coop that keeps the poor and poverty going...

In the '20s when Katherine Mayo came out with Mother India, Gandhi wrote of it, '... it is the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon, or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the opened drains...' In a sense Aravind Adiga's book could also be described as a drain inspector's report...however, I say that in an entirely complimentary sense...it takes courage for someone to expose the underbelly of the call centre revolution.. .looks like many have not read the book yet in India, or there would have been outcry by now to have Aravind deported...

One thing that struck me at a very personal level was the Rumi quotation that Aravind keeps using,

Like a madman I kept searching for the key
And then I realized the door was open...

Read the book to see how Rumi helps a rooster escapes the Rooster Coop...be ready for much gore, dirt and crap...a tremendous read...there is no moral at the end of the story...as Mr Ashok would have said...sorry, let me not take the punch line away...read it to see what Mr Ashok would have said to Pinky Madam...