The White Tiger - A Review

Hi Friends,

A 'Man Booker Prize' for 2008 - richly deserved. Hard-hitting but true. It shreds almost all reality in India to pieces. You can't escape his " aka - Munna, Balram Halwai, Country-Mouse, Ashok Sharma etc." analysis or version. It is just true. What would be interesting is, if Mr. Adiga comes out in the same 'form' for other aspects of the world like injustice for the common man in the West, World Politics, World of Sports and the list goes on. The fact is, this can become a 'genre' in itself. A writing style. But for this to succeed the author needs to be fully aware of the local issues/slang/pulse etc.,

A thoroughly engrossing book. My colleague & friend 'Amin Merchant' would relate to this book very closely.

A snapshot (of what to expect):

I should explain a thing or two about caste. Even Indians get confused about this word, especially educated Indians in the cities. They'll make a mess of explaining it to you. But it's simple, really.

Let's start with me.
See - Balram Halwai, Halwai, my name, means 'sweet-maker'.
That's my caste - my destiny. Everyone in the Darkness who hears that name knows all about me at once. That's why me and my brother Kishan kept getting jobs at sweetshops wherever we went. The owner thought, Ah, they're Halwais, making sweets and tea is in their blood.

But if we were Halwais, then why was my father not making sweets but pulling a rickshaw? Why did I grow up breaking coals and wiping tables, instead of eating gulab jamuns and sweet pastries when and where I chose to? Why was I lean and dark and cunning, and not fat and creamy-skinned and smiling, like a boy raised on sweets would be?

See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well-kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy. Goldsmiths here. Cowherds here. Landlords there. The man called a Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchable cleaned faeces.Landlords were kind to their serfs. Women covered their heads with a veil and turned their eyes to the ground when talking to strange men.

And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 - the day the British left - the cages has been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn't matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up. My father's father must have been a real Halwai, a sweet-maker, but when he inherited the shop, a member of some other caste must have stolen it from him with the help of the police. My father had not had the belly to fight back. That's why he had fallen all the way to the mud, to the level of a rickshaw-puller. That's why I was cheated of my destiny to be fat, and creamy-skinned, and smiling.

To sum up - in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies.

And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up.

Cheers,

Pradeep Kabra