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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.

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Glory

From Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts:

And Nazeer raised his assault rifle, and fired as he ran, and I saw Mahmoud Melbaaf firing ahead of me, on my right, where Suleiman had been, and I raised my weapon, and pulled the trigger.

There was a horrible,  blood-freezing scream somewhere very close. I suddenly recognized it as my own, but I couldn’t stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.

I just finished Shantaram yesterday and I must say, it is easily my favorite novel. This book is an amazing piece of autobiographical fiction. In an interview with CNN Talk Asia, Roberts mentions that all the events are real but the characters are imagined, leaving us with a psuedo-true story piece of literary genius. Roberts’ story is fascinating. After his marriage broke down and he lost custody of his daughter, Roberts turned to heroin, and committed a series of robberies with an imitation pistol, eventually leading to a 19-year conviction in Australia’s maximum-security Pentridge Prison. He escaped to become one of Australia’s most wanted men and spent ten years as a fugitive in Bombay where he established a free health clinic while living in the slum, became involved with the Bombay mafia, working as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier, and went to war in Afghanistan to fight with the mujahedin.

Eventually, Roberts was recaptured and served out his sentence and finished Shantaram, of which the first two drafts (600 pages of work) were destroyed in prison.

With Shantaram, Roberts uses elements of his life to craft a thrilling novel about love, life, adventure, friendship, betrayal, exile and freedom. You might think that reading this 933-page book would be a daunting task, but the book is beautifully written and its pages go by all too fast. Read this book.

Gregory David Roberts is a pretty serious badass. I recommending watching the whole CNN Talk Asia interview.

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Justice

From Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts:

Their punishment, for fighting about religion, was that each had to learn one complete prayer from the religious observances of the other.

‘In this way is justice done,’ Qasim Ali said that night, his bark-coloured eyes softening on the two young men,  ’because justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’

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Freedom

Taking a cue from Eileen, who beautifully designed this blog by recreating a cat pillow I bought for my girlfriend in Hong Kong in Illustrator as a logo, here is a quotation…

From Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Literally the first paragraph.