The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga has written a very incisive and at times controversial book. The story revolves around TWO INDIAS we are witnessing; an affluent India, and an India that is beset by common problems that plague underdeveloped and developing countries. The glitz and shine we see is confined to a very select areas and by seeing few flyovers, neon lights and massive malls one cannot delusionary feel that India has arrived and at par with western countries. we still have poverty, disease, unemployment, homelessness and other social evils that constitute majority India.

Critics have been at Adiga's throat saying he sold India to claim Booker and their claim rings hollow. Whoe world is aware of what we are and we dont need Adiga to reveal anything new.

In short Adiga has addressed real issues and given the fact that this is his maiden effort, he has written admirably well.

Truly impressive ....... i really enjoyed while reading The White Tiger. Hats of to you Arvind Adiga...

Review Article

Balram breaks out of his cage
in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Dr. A.J. Sebastian sdb
Reader & Head, Department of English
Nagaland University, Kohima
e-mail: ajsebsdb@hotmail.com


Aravid Adiga bagged the Man Booker Prize 2008 for his debut novel The White Tiger, set in the backdrop of the economic boom in India that has ushered in a great chasm between the haves and have-nots. As Adiga himself has said: "Well, this is the reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. …At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society” (Jeffries).
Balram Halwai, who never had an identity of his own, uses any means necessary to fulfill his dream of making money. He becomes a megalomaniac who murders his boss and confesses his rising to be an entrepreneur in the call centre hub of Bangalore. He calls his life’s story ‘The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian.’ (TWT 10).
This paper attempts to trace the metaphor of the Rooster Coop in which Balram is trapped and the way he breaks out to freedom being a ‘white tiger.”
The novel is written in the epistolary form as a seven-part letter to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao “From the Desk of ‘The White Tiger’/ A Thinking Man / And an entrepreneur / Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing/ Electronic City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road/ Bangalore/ India,”(TWT 3) in which Balram confesses his guilt and his ambition – his emergence from the world of "Darkness" to the world of “Light” of the cities which is a world of servants and masters: from brutal poverty and deprivation to successful entrepreneurship. His cynicism and deep rooted-immoral ways are dangerous trends leading to anarchy in our society. The novel exposes Indian democracy, injustice and entrepreneurship.
The novel is a social commentary and a study of injustice and power in the form of a class struggle in India that depicts the anti-hero Balram representing the downtrodden sections of the Indian society juxtaposed against the rich. “The White Tiger protagonist exposes the rot in the three pillars of modern India - democracy, enterprise and justice – reducing them to the tired clichés of a faltering nation.… that the West is holding The White Tiger as a mirror to us. It is telling us that India is not shining and, despite its claims of a booming economy, it is still “the near-heart of darkness”, which it has been since time immemorial” (Saxena 9).
As Adiga says: “The novel is written in "voice"—in Balram's voice—and not in mine. Some of the things that he's confused by or angry about are changes in India that I approve of; … Some of the other things he's unhappy about—like corruption—are easier for me to identify with. When talking to many men whom I met in India, I found a sense of rage, often suppressed for years and years, that would burst out when they finally met someone they could talk to… Balram's anger is not an anger that the reader should participate in entirely—it can seem at times like the rage you might feel if you were in Balram's place—but at other times you should feel troubled by it, certainly” (DiMartino).
The story unfolds the way Balram breaks out to his new found freedom from a caged life of misery through crime and cunning. This is a reflection of contemporary India, calling attention to social justice in the wake of economic prosperity. It is a novel about the emerging new India which is pivoted on the great divide between the haves and have-nots with moral implications.
Deirdre Donahue labels The White Tiger an angry novel about injustice and power “But Tiger isn't about race or caste in India. It's about the vast economic inequality between the poor and the wealthy elite. The narrator is an Indian entrepreneur detailing his rise to power. His India is a merciless, corrupt Darwinian jungle where only the ruthless survive”(Donahue).
Adiga depicts his protagonist as “…he's talking out into the night, in his isolated room. He has to tell his story to someone, but he can't ever do so because it's a terrible story. …today, it is the man from China, which is India's alter-ego in so many ways. Indians today are absolutely obsessed with the Chinese, and keep comparing themselves to China out of a belief that the future of the world lies with India and China.” (DiMartino).

Adiga’s first hand meeting the poor of India inspired him to create his protagonist: “Many of the Indians I met while I traveled through India blended into Balram; but the character is ultimately of my own invention. I wanted to depict someone from India's underclass—which is perhaps 400 million strong—and which has largely missed out on the economic boom, and which remains invisible in most films and books coming out of India… someone whose moral character seems to change by the minute—trustworthy one minute, but untrustworthy the next—who would embody the moral contradictions of life in today's India. I'm glad you point out that he is a hustler—which he is!—one of the frustrations of writing a book like this is that so many critics seem to think that Balram's views are meant to be taken objectively!” (DiMartino).
Summing up the Booker jury’s decision Michael Portillo commented: "The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour." (Porttillo). The novel is a witty parable of India's changing society, yet there is also much to ponder (Rushby).
The novel is centred on the crime Balram commits and he goes on to recounts how he became an entrepreneur coming into the ‘Light’ of prosperity. Born in a tiny hell-hole called Laxmangarh in northern India, his impoverished parents merely called him 'munna' -- 'boy' and they raised him in the world of darkness of their extreme poverty. While at school, Balram was spotted by the inspector of schools who offered to get a scholarship for his education:
You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals – the creature that comes along only once in a generation?’
I thought about it and said:
‘The white tiger.’
‘That’s what you are, in this jungle’ (TWT 35).
Balram considers himself "half-baked" as he was deprived of schooling like most children of his age group in India. His parents preferred him to work in a teashop, however one of the feudal lords took him to Delhi, where he began to experience the world of light. He learned driving and was employed as a chauffeur by Mr. Ashok at Dhanbad.

While in Delhi Balram experiences the two kinds of India with those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out (Walters).

The key metaphor in the novel is of the Rooster Coop. Balram is caged like the chickens in the rooster coop. He, being a white tiger, has to break out of the cage to freedom.

Go to Old Delhi ...and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages...They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country (TWT 173-4).
Balram decides to become a big-bellied man, by resorting to corrupt ways he has learnt through bribery, crime, disregarding all civilized ways of life. His violent bid for freedom is shocking. Is he made just another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist ? (Turpin). Adiga “strikes a fine balance between the sociology of the wretched place he has chosen as home and the twisted humanism of the outcast” (Prasannarajan). Balram breaks away slowly from his family which is contrary to the Indian tradition where loyalty to ones family upholds moral principles. Through his criminal drive Balram becomes a businessman and runs a car service for the call centres in Bangalore.

Balram’s commentary is replete with Irony, paradox, and anger that run like a poison throughout every page (Andrew). “Above all, it’s a vision of a society of people complicit in their own servitude: to paraphrase Balram, they are roosters guarding the coop, aware they’re for the chop, yet unwilling to escape. Ultimately, the tiger refuses to stay caged. Balram’s violent bid for freedom is shocking” (Turpin).
The protagonist confirms that the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy. This is a paradox and a mystery of India.
Because Indians are the world’s most honest people… No. It’s because 99.9 per cent of us are caught in the Rooster coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market. The Rooster Coop doesn’t always work with miniscule sums of money. Don’t test your chauffeur with a rupee coin or two - he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars in front of a servant and he won’t touch a penny… Masters trust their servants with diamonds in this country!...Why doesn’t that servant take the suitcase full of diamonds? He is no Gandhi, he’s human, he’s you and me. But he’s in the 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 to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude… can a man break out of the coop? …the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop….only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten, and burned alive by masters – can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature (TWT 175-7).
Balram shows his perverted psychopathic nature by deciding to break out of the coop betraying his family and society. He has to suffer humiliation in the hands of his masters with ever increasing menial duties which climaxes in his being blackmailed when Ashoke’s wife Pinky kills a man in drunken driving. He was forced to sign a statement accepting full responsibility for the accident:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,
I, Balram Hawai, son of Vikram Halwai, of Laxmangarh village in the district of Gaya, do make the following statement of my own free will and intention:
That I drove the car that hit an unidentified person, or persons, or person and objects, on the night of January 23rd of this year. That I then panicked and refused to fulfil my obligations to the injured party or parties by taking them to the nearest hospital emergency ward. That there were no other occupants of the car at the time of the accident. That I was alone in the car, and alone responsible for all that happened.
I swear by almighty God that I make this statement under no duress and under instruction from no one (TWT 168).

He has to suppress his embittered feelings being confined to the Rooster Coop. He cannot go contrary to his master’s bidding. He is falsely implicated and forced to accept responsibility for a crime he has not committed. A remorse filled Pinky madam leaves Mr. Ashok for good in the middle of the night pushing a fat envelope with cash into Balram’s hands. From then on, he has to play the wife-substitute for Mr. Ashok. He has to oversee his master’s every need as he turns to heavy drinking. Left to control his master, Balram begins to awaken from his reverie in the Rooster Coop. Having been a witness to all of Ashoke’s corrupt practices and gambling with money to buy politicians, to kill and to loot, Balram decides to steal and kill. Adiga delves deep into his subconscious like the stream of consciousness novelists:

Go on, just look at the red bag, Balram – that’s not stealing, is it?
I shook my head.
And even you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing.
How so? I looked at the creature in the mirror.
See- Mr. Ashok is giving money to all these politicians in Delhi so that they will excuse him from the tax he has to pay. And who owns that tax, in the end? Who but the ordinary people of this country – you! (244).

Balram knew his boss had collected a total of Rs.700,000/- stuffed into the red bag. That was sufficient money for him to begin a new life with a house of his own, a motorbike and a small shop. He hatched the murder plan in quick succession:

I touched the magnetic stickers of the goddess Kali for luck, then opened the glove compartment. There it was – the broken bottle, with its claws of glass. ‘There’s something off with the wheel, sir. Just give me a couple of minutes.’… There was soggy black mud everywhere. Picking my way over mud and rainwater, I squatted near the left rear wheel… ‘Sir, will you step out, there is a problem.’… The wheel, sir. I’ll need your help. It’s stuck in the mud’ (281-2).

Adiga probes further into the mind of Balram like an expert psychologist and finds him in perfect mental state, determined to execute his plans with precision:

He was still wriggling – his body was moving as far from me as it could. I’m losing him, I thought, and this forced me to do something I knew I would hate myself for, even years later. I really didn’t want to do this – I really didn’t want him to think, even in the two or three minutes he had left to live, that I was that kind of a driver – the one that resorts to blackmailing his master – but he had left me no option:… I got down on my knees and hid behind the car… He got down on his knees. I rose over him, holding the bottle held behind my back with a bent arm… I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains….The stunned body fell into the mud. A hissing sound came out of its lips, like wind escaping from a tyre (284-5).

He was not fully satisfied with the crime. He feared his recovery and the consequences would be fatal – police case and the terrible destruction of his family. So turning the body around and stamping his knees on its chest, he pierced the neck “and his lifeblood spurted into my eyes. I was blind. I was a free man” (286).

He is free at last out of the Rooster Coop. But the run for his new-found life begins for Balram. He is on the run to make his dream come true. A peep into the level of poverty into which millions of his fellow Indians are plunged is imperative for a proper assessment of the criminal and the gravity of his crime.

Statistics show how poverty is on the rise in India: i) 4 in every 10 Indian children are malnourished according to a UN report. ii) India Ranks a lowly 66 out of 88 countries in the Global Hunger Index 2008. The report says India has more hungry people – more than 200 million – than any other country in the world. iii) One third of the world’s poor live in India, according to the latest poverty estimates from the World Bank. Based on its new threshold of poverty - $ 1.25 a day – the number of poor people has gone up from 421 million in 1981 to 456 million in 2005. iv) India ranks 128 out of 177 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index…. Aravid Adiga’s story of a rickshawallah’s move from the “darkness” of rural India to the “light” of urban Gurgaon reminds us of the harsh facts behind the fiction (Raaj 9).

Adiga speaks out his mind why he wrote the novel: “… I want to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power… I wanted something that would provoke and annoy people …The servant-master system implies two things: One is that the servants are far poorer than the rich—a servant has no possibility of ever catching up to the master. And secondly, he has access to the master—the master’s money, the master’s physical person. Yet crime rates in India are very low… What is stopping a poor man from taking to the crime that occurs in Venezuela or South Africa? You need two things [for crime to occur]—a divide and a conscious ideology of resentment. We don’t have resentment in India. The poor just assume that the rich are a fact of life. For them, getting angry at the rich is like getting angry at the heat…But I think we’re seeing what I believe is a class-based resentment for the first time…” (Sawhney).

Injustice and inequality has always been around us and we get used to it. How long can it go on? Social discontent and violence has been on the rise. What Adiga highlights is the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor and the economic system that lets a small minority to prosper at the expense of the majority. “At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society… the great divide.” (Raaj 9).

Commenting on a servant’s viewpoint in the novel, Adiga writes: “It is his subjective views, which are pretty depressing. There are also two crimes that he commits: he robs, and he kills, and by no means do I expect a reader to sympathize with both the crimes. He’s not meant to be a figure whose views you should accept entirely. There’s evidence within the novel that the system is more flexible than Balram suggests, and it is breaking down faster than he claims. And within the story I hope that there’s evidence of servants cheating the masters systematically...to suggest a person’s capacity for evil or vice is to grant them respect—is to acknowledge their capacity for volition and freedom of choice” (Sawhney).

When he plans meticulously how to snatch Ashok’s huge money bag, he gets out of his Rooster Coop and takes a plunge into the entrepreneur’s world. He never gives up the fight for survival like the freak white tiger. While visiting the National zoo in Delhi he tells Dharam: “Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence” (TWT 276). When he chanced to see the white tiger in the enclosure, he began his musings: “…Not any kind of tiger. The creature that gets born only once every generation in the jungle. I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars… He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this – that was the only way he could tolerate this cage….The tiger’s eyes met my eyes, like my master’s eyes have met mine in the mirror of the car. All at once, the tiger vanished… My knees began to shake; I felt light” (276-7).

This sequence is central to the Rooster Coop metaphor. It is like the epiphanic experience of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where he makes his flight of fancy: “… a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?… His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight” (Joyce 154).

It is the experience of being hypnotized by the tiger that energizes the criminal in him to be blood thirsty and take law into his own hands. The more he is educated, he becomes more corrupt, and the reader’s sympathy for the psychopath never dwindles.

Such crimes are taking place in our cities. Recently it was reported that workers at a car parts factory near Delhi murdered the chief executive after they were laid off. “It rattled a lot of people,” says Adiga. “That kind of incident used to be highly unlikely. Now it is much more likely” (Times Online).

Neel Mukherjee in his review “Exposing the real India,” examines the 'economic miracle' in the background of “a very large majority lives in abject, shocking poverty, that the gap between the rich and the poor is a vast, unbridgeable, ever-growing chasm, and that social redistribution policies are either unenforceable or have failed?” (Mukherjee).
The Rooster Coop continues to exist like a never ending oppressive system. “The rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs…The coop is guarded from the inside” (TWT 194). As Andrew Holgate opines, “Rather than encouraging freedom and "enterprise," everything in this system -- landlords, family, education, politics -- seems designed specifically to suppress them” (Holgate).
Balram escaping from the Coop, is a servant turned villain and a murderer who becomes a self-proclaimed entrepreneur who calls himself "I'm tomorrow" (TWT 6). He subscribes to a philosophy of future with hope. As he awaits to board a train he gets on to a weight machine which represents for him “final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop. The sirens of the coop were ringing - its wheels turning – its red lights flashing! A rooster was escaping from the coop! A hand was thrust out – I was picked up by the neck and shoved back into the coop. I picked the chit up and re-read it”(248). His subconscious kept haunting him of his escape from the coop of his past oppression. Moving from train to train he keep his track untraceable by the law enforcing agencies who had advertised his pictures as a wanted man.
Life in Bangalore has to be that of a fugitive as “White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous” ( 302). But he has to keep in touch with the world of the road and the pavement where he received his education to freedom. Speaking of the socialist leaders in Bangalore on whom people placed their hope of revolution.
Keep your ears open in Bangalore – in any city or town in India – and you will hear stirrings, rumours, threats of insurrection. Men sit under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and point fingers to the heavens. One night, will they all join together – will they destroy the Rooster coop? …Maybe once in a hundred years there is a revolution that frees the poor (303).
Sitting in his comfortable office as an entrepreneur living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing, Balram is confident that he will not be caught by law enforcing agents as he has stepped out of the coop of his past.
I think the Rooster coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs masters like Mr. Ashok – who, for all his numerous virtues, was not much of a master – to be weeded out, and exceptional servants like me to to replace them…I am one of those who cannot be caught in India… I’ve made it! I’ve broken out of the coop!...I’ll never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat. I’ll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant (TWT 320-1).
In portraying the character of Balram, Adiga has excelled in projecting a typical psychopath / sociopath, our society can churn out. In “Behavioural Traits of Psychopaths”, Jennifer Copley points out: “While most people’s actions are guided by a number of factors, such as the desire to avoid hurting other people, the psychopath selects a course of action based on only one factor—what can he get out of it. This cold-blooded mode of reasoning enables the psychopath to commit acts that most people’s consciences would not allow” ( Copley). Psychopaths are also known as sociopaths who are manipulative, deceitful, impulsive lacking self-restraint, and inclined to take risks. They are “Callous, deceitful, reckless, guiltless …. The psychopath understands the wishes and concerns of others; he simply does not care…. The psychopath believes that rules and morals are for other, weaker people who obey because they fear punishment” (Adams) . . . All these traits are found in Balram who goes about heroically planning his heinous crimes.

The novel exposes the ferociousness of the man who after bloodletting through murder will turn out to be a man-eater himself. What guarantees if he will not commit murders for reasons of rivalry in his entrepreneurial world of cut throat competition. Revenge murder is no solution to bring about social justice. Subscribing to his principle of taking law into his own hands, will lead only to anarchy and escalation of violence, as W.B. Yeats points out in “The Second Coming,” in the background of Russian revolution as well as the Irish troubles:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity (Yeats 1700).

Excessive economic inequalities and unwarranted delay in applying the remedies for them are often the causes of such dissention. Besides, quest for power and total disregard for human rights helps escalate violence and strife among men. There is need for organizations that promote peace among men. Remedial measures have to be taken by Government and law makers to prevent rampant corruption and oppression of the downtrodden. Let not the law of the jungle prevail as Adiga has proven through his protagonist. Mere anarchy and chaos will prevail if an evil is hatched to counter another evil.

There are some Indians who wonder if the award was given to The White Tiger to mar the face of India in the international arena as she is becoming a global economic power. Is the West exposing our poverty and unrest to hurt our national pride? Such fears are baseless as Adiga has brought out a fable with superb mingling of his observation. Though several critics have raised eyebrows stating that Adiga has not depicted the brave new India in a sufficiently glowing light, David Godwin comes to his rescue saying, “It really isn’t the job of a writer to be the ambassador for his country. A writer’s commitment is to the truth as he sees it” (Roy 4). Manjula Padmanabhan, author and playwright, is very critical of Adiga when she says that the book is “a tedious, unfunny slog, …compelling, angry and darkly humourous… But is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do? Is it enough to paint an ugly picture and then suggest that the way out is to slit the oppressor's throat and become an oppressor oneself?" (Padmanabhan). Whatever be the critical appraisal, as Gurcharan Das would opine, “A book should not be judged on the basis of whether it creates a negative or positive picture of a country. It should be seen as a work of art and judged on its literary merits” (Das).
However, The White Tiger should make every right thinking citizen to read the signs of the times and be socially conscious of the rights and duties of each one, irrespective of cast, creed or economic status, to prevent create the types of Ashok and Balram in our society.

-------
References
Adams, David B. “Sociopaths.” http://www.geocities.com/lycium7/psychopathy.html,
Downloaded on November 4, 2008.
Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
(Abbreviated TWT).
Andrew, Holgate. “Review”. June 16, 2008. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-
review/note.asp?note=17701793. downloaded on November 1, 2008.
Copley, Jennifer Behavioural Traits of Psychopaths.” July 30, 2008.
com/article.cfm/behavioural_traits_of_psychopaths, downloaded on November 4, 2008.
Das, Gurcharan. Sunday Times of India, October 19, 2008, p.9.
DiMartino, Nick. “Interview with Aravind Adiga” October 6, 2008.
(http://universitybookstore.blogspot.com/2008/10/nick-interviews- aravind- adiga.html). Downloaded on 19/10/08.
Donahue, Deirdre. “Review.” USA Today April4, 2008. Downloaded on 19/10/08.
(http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2008-04-23-roundup-debut-
novels_N.htm) Downloaded on 19/10/08.
Holgate, Andrew. “Review.”
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=17701793.
Downloaded on 19/10/08.
Jeffries, Stuart “Roars of anger”, The Guardian. October 16, 2008.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/16/booker-prize). Downloaded on
19/10/08.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Delhi: Surjeet Publications, 1991.
Mukherjee, Neel. “ Exposing the real India.” The Telegraph. April 4, 2008.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/27/boadi127.xml.
Downloaded on 01/11/2008.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. The Outlook India.14 October 2008.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20081014&fname=Books&sid=188888.
Downloaded on 01/11/2008.
Porttillo, Michael. Oct. 15, 08. http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1146
Saxena, Shobhan, “Fact not Fiction”, Sunday Times of India, October 19, 2008, p.9.
Prasannarajan, S. India Today. 17/4/2008. http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/index.php?
option=com_ content&issueid=50&task=view&id=7128&Itemid=1. Downloaded on
01/11/2008.
Raaj, Neelam. “Any Tears for the Aam Aadmi?”Sunday Times of India, October 19,
2008, p.9.
Roy, Amit. Aravind Adiga wins ‘God’ of Agents.” The Telegraph. October 29, 2008, p.4.
Rushby, Kevin. The Guardian. April 19, 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,
333611710-110738,00.html. Downloaded on 11/10/08.
Sawhney, Hirish. “ India: A View from Below.” September, 2008.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/09/express/india-a-view-from-below
Times Online . “News Review Interview, 19 October 2008.
(http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_ and_entertainment/books/article4967568.ece. Downloaded on 21/10/08.
Turpin, Adrian. Financial Times. April 19, 2008. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/886f92c4-09c8-11dd-81bf - 0000779fd2ac.html. Downloaded on 22/10/08.
Walters, Kerry. “Caught in the rooster coop”. May 27, 2008.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1PV1V1ICZXUE9/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#
R1PV1V1ICZXUE9. Downloaded on 23/10/08.
Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming.” The Oxford Anthology of English Literature Vol. II. Ed. Frank Kermode & John Hollander. Oxford. O.U.P, 1973.

pretty interesting book......but some times I found little shades of Chetan bhagat narration in it.. overall a great book to read!!

Here it goes...

1. Overall good book, interesting packaging
2.I like the references made to the local hubs of New Delhi.
3. I especially agree to the Gurgaon structure and its nuances

Overall a good book for an average non indian resident or any one
who still thinks india is all about snake charmers. A good maiden effort
but a little overhyped - but why not since the writer is a fellow Indian
and we are proud of it...so bells and whistles...

Rating - Generous only because you got us the Bookers Prize 9/10 :)

the narrative style will suit for every kind of reader...i like references to delhi places which seems corroborating the story(line)..writing is like..."we make things simpler"...

This book is a very nice book if you want understand India from the point of view of a poor person who makes it journey from darkness in villages to the light in the city...
The style of narration is very nice which will suit every reader...
His views should really be appreciated as he speaks the bitter truth about India in some places when he mentions the river ganga or exploitation of the poor by the rich..
Over all an awesome book & a must read ...

this is like one essay about indian caste system,politics,relegion,one rupee,drinks,boobs,etc. adiga purposly write this for booker prize? I dnt found any extra matter,but forigners by this, can understand what this india? all will read this book and start think about india in ugly way.adiga exposed the india as he saw,and because the prize same exposed to the world.after reading this,anyone can tell dirty indian people? to create suchthing purposly the prize was given?simple language,narrative,anyone can read and understand.balaram like a ditective ............

The novel is excellent. It tells the reality that privails in india.wonderful book to read and digest...

The White Tiger is a good novel. Mr Adiga pointed out everything about india i.e.he wrote about hindus,muslims, brahmins, roads,films,animals,rivers,americans, japanees,poors ,rich peoples and so on.But purposly?not written about cristians why?This shows what,one can imagine,this is written according to direction of cristian? Because in india everywhere converting hindu people into cristians .As Balaram,the driver not pointed this. According to my view Mr. Aravind is half baked cristian. Because he donated a huge amount out of BOOKER PRIZE to one of the catholic institute!In India is it necessary to kill any boss to become rich?whole novel becomes Mr. Adiga's view but in Balaram's voice.He veiwed very minute particle and narrated clearly

The Oscar contender is eliciting protests as well as praise for its portrayal of Mumbai s

The WHITE TIGER, a face of Indian people, described so elegantly that how a poor boy become an entrepreneur.

Well explanation of each and every aspect.. while reading you feel to be in the character. HATS OFF to Arivand.

The style of writing is good.Novel shows the dark side of indian cast system,economic system and the particular attitude penitrated in people belonging to particular community and the problem one face when anted to do something different . The part in which 'Balram' speaks with 'Dehli City' seems to have impact of the scene in the book 'The Alchemist-By Paulo Coehelo' in which Santiago speaks with desert,wind and the sun.
Writer narrated Dehli life as it is, corrupt politicians,accidents caused by drunk rich people..and life of drivers of rich people..The part is also intersting where 'Balram'
wants to sleep with a foreigner..n how the hotel manager and prostitute cheat him...the feeling of 'Balram' that he can never live a life like his master..
Over all the book is good to read...But we all know about it..there is nothin different to knw about or it doesnt show anythng new...the same picture we got in many movie..Life of drivers is well pictured in madhur bahandarkar's 'Page-3' and 'Corporate'.

a real one after the midnights childdren.........must read.

a real one after the midnights childdren.........must read.

Arvind Adiga did not mentioned any where that the story is real and based on Dhanbad most famous person and alleged coal mafia Surya Dev Singh. Singh was a domestic help and later become hench man of a wealthy politician BP Sinha. Later he over run him and took his empire and proclaimed himself as a king of the coal capital of india. One who are aware about the true story of Surya Dev Singh will not impressed by the presentation of this novel although narration is very good. Dhanbad is my home town and I am aware about the entire story. This story is already narrated in the novels of Ilyas Ahmad Gaddi Novels like Fire Area which is in Urdu language. A very good account on life of Singh is written by Dhanbad's veteran journalist Brahma Dev Singh Sharma in his Hindi book "Dhanbad Ateet Vartaman And Bhavishya".

www.aftab1.com

white tiger is very interesting book . it shows how the indians peoples are . it includes so many contents to understandable. this can change more peoples life

the book white tiger contains indians culture.It shows how the peoples are behaving in indian society. the white tiger is the most relevent novel tin this world.

The White Tiger does not deserve the Booker Prize. In fact, it is not even a good work of literary fiction. It is banal satire trying to don the garb of literature.
The only good thing about the novel is that the satire in it takes a critical look at various facets of the social and political life in India. The largest democracy in the world is a country without adequate “drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality” [4]. But it has entrepreneurs, thousands and thousands of them, who are going to make it an economic superpower, though these entrepreneurs “are made from half-baked clay” [11].
The novel brings to light the “Darkness” of the emerging superpower called India. Its river of emancipation, the Ganga, is a morass of “faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids” [15]. Its teachers are thieves who steal the uniforms and lunches of their malnourished students. The electoral promises made by its political leaders are likely to end with the laying of foundation stones. It is a country whose complex caste system of the olden days has given way to a system of just two castes: Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small Bellies; and “only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up” [64]. The elections are rigged by powerful politicians in connivance with corrupt officials and policemen. India is a country where the plaintiff will become the accused if the real culprit is influential enough.
A good part of the novel is set in Delhi. The nation’s capital is portrayed as “a crazy city” where colonies and houses are given numbers that follow “no known system of logic.” All the roads in the city have names, but no one seems to know those names. Moreover, the people may mislead you if you ask for a particular road by its name. “The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and the people are bad. The police are totally rotten. If they see you without a seat belt, you’ll have to bribe them a hundred rupees” [124] (emphasis in original).
Though in many places the novel reads like a tourist guide meant for foreigners or like superficial journalese, the author succeeds in satirising many of the vices commonly found in India. Where he succeeds the best, the characters end up as caricatures. That’s why I consider the novel as satire.
Yet Aravind Adiga is not a satirist. He thinks he is writing a serious novel. He really thinks (or at least that’s how it comes across) that the only way to survive in this messy state of affairs is to develop a Big Belly and start swallowing those with Small Bellies. The most glaring fault of the novel is precisely that: the absence of any deep vision or imagination. Genuine satire can end with exposing the vices and follies without necessarily presenting an alternative vision, because the ridicule raised by satire is its curative tool. But a novel with any pretension to being a work of serious literature has a duty at least to hint at something deep, something sublime in the part of the humanity presented in it.
The White Tiger is crowded with vicious characters. There is not even one character that makes any deep impression on the reader. America-returned Ashok is the only character who reveals a touch of goodness. But he turns out to be a mere “Lamb” among the vicious wolves in India. Eventually he too is drawn into the vortex of evil by the politicians and their henchmen in Delhi. Ashok’s goodness acquired from America cannot survive in wicked and filthy India! Is Adiga more colonial than the colonists?
The protagonist of the novel is a semi-literate rustic who moves from his hut in the village to a posh house as a driver, and then to Delhi. He ‘grows up’ from being a Man with a Small Belly to one with a big one, by committing a grotesque crime which is described luridly in the novel. The author seems to justify the means employed by the protagonist!
The novel also presents a ‘thesis’ (that’s almost how it reads) on what the author calls the Rooster Coop [173-6]. The poor are compared to the chickens huddled together in a butcher’s coop. The only means of escape from that coop is implicitly presented as ruthless violence.
No doubt, Adiga is presenting a world in which traditional moral codes, religious teachings, social ethics or plain goodness are non-existent or have become irrelevant. It is a world of ruthless competition, not just for survival but for luxurious life. But shorn of the depth in vision and imagination required of a literary writer, the novel remains mere pulp fiction. That’s why I am surprised that it won the Booker Prize. That’s also why I won’t recommend this novel to anyone.
[The page numbers in brackets refer to the Harper Collins hardbound edition.]

white tiger ///////// ////??????
huh.....i found it a black buk....
i mean .. it actually is a dark story...
lol...dunoo hw it gt d award n al......
u cn read it fr d hype it gt cos f d award...
bt else pure waste f time n money .. :(

THE TIGER FROM THE LAND OF DARKNESS :The way Aravind Adiga entertains in this booker-clinching page-turner absolves him of ‘all the sins’ which are supposedly committed by him as perceived by some of literary critics, in his debut novel. The white tiger aka Balram Halwai is not a typical at the bottom of the pyramid character from the land of darkness. He is a revolutionary in some sense because he refuses to accept his position what the pseudo-democratic society bestows upon him.On the way to liberation what he does is a crime. Is Balram’s crime bigger than other players of the story? Everybody ,from politicians to bureaucrats , from feudal lords to hoi-polloi,at some point of time commits a crime against the people who are at the lowest level of pecking order. It hardly makes difference that sometime crime is committed out of circumstantial compulsions.

The description of darker side of India will not be by liked by the people who still (with full conviction )believe in ‘Shining India’ and for whom the parameter of progress is limited to the SENSEX or NIFTY. But for a person who is surviving on the one and half course meals, SENSEX even at 30000 has no meaning. Anybody coming from the land of darkness knows that the grim realities potrayed by Aravind in his novel is not a figment of his imagination but it really exists. In fact, it exists in even more perverse form.Yes, at times he is a culprit of generlisations but that is forgiv”able” because for a writer of fiction you can’t use the strict parameter of a social-historian. Overall feel of the book is almost near to the reality

Magnificent and truly Heart Touching Story. Must Read by all students.

Received my first pair of uggs boots on sale for Christmas and I have fallen in love with them.

Share more ugg boots on sale on http://www.maxugg.com