Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
From Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger:
The Great Indian Rooster Coop… Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police.
That’s because we have the coop.
Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jibao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent– as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way– to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.
So I’ve read a few India books lately, Shantaram and Sacred Games. Both of those books are behemoths and extremely comprehensive- they gave me so much context that it made me feel that The White Tiger was a little bit lacking. The White Tiger deals with some similar concepts as the other two, but is considerably smaller and more focused, straight-forward.
That being said, Adiga’s novel is a fun read and chronicles the story of Balram Halwai, who through a series of letters to the Premier of the State Council of China, tells how he went from taxi driver, to business entrepreneur, and killed his master. Balram’s voice is great, and he comes off like a real asshole, but somehow at the end, I didn’t feel the same kind of honesty that I felt after Shantaram and Sacred Games. I think I may have liked this book more if I hadn’t read the other India books first. This may have been a better stepping stone into the other ones because it’s such a fast-paced read.
I think the book is very contrived- it paints a fantastical picture of India. I am an Indian myself and I am yet to see a rickshaw puller who would not name his son( unlike what Adiga tells us);among other things!
I attempted a review of the book myself at http://www.book-review-circle.com/the-white-tiger-aravind-adiga.html
Hey Ashmita, I definitely feel a bit like our hero Balram’s voice is a tad contrived. And I don’t really know anything about India but I also think that the image of India described is supposed to be a warped image. Balram is full of himself and pretty crazy and I think that’s supposed to permeate into his idea of India. But hey, that’s just my opinion!