Book Review: The White Tiger

Note: Despite what you might think after reading this review, there are barely any spoilers in it.

Whenever I pick up a new book, I go through its back cover to see if there’s an outline mentioned somewhere. When I picked up The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, I did the same thing, and one of the reviews printed on the back cover caught my attention. It said:

‘… an excoriating piece of work, relentless in its stripping away of the veneer of “India Rising” to expose its rotting heart.’

And here’s what gave me a kick: as I went back to the front cover and flipped a couple of pages, I saw the disclaimer that said, “This novel is entirely a work of fiction…”

When a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes and reads the statutory warning written on it in tiny letters, “smoking is injurious to your health,” what’s the first thing that comes to his mind? To rephrase the question, does anyone really think that the cigarette manufacturer wants us to take the warning seriously?

I felt the same way about that disclaimer, and after reading the book, I’m even more certain about it. The kind of two Indias described in it are probably way truer than most of my fellow Indians would have the courage to admit.

Whether or not the story described in it is true, the picture is much too real. Or, as I would say to another Ayn Rand admirer, this book is as much a work of fiction as We The Living is not Ayn Rand’s autobiography.

The book is in the form of a long and fictitious letter the author writes to the Chinese Premier, who’s about to visit India. The author writes this letter in order to describe the stark contrast between the real India and the India that will be presented to the Premier during his visit here.

The author accomplishes that by narrating his own story — his journey from the wretched lanes of a small town named Laxmangarh where he spent his days working on a tea stall, to Bangalore, where he currently owns a successful transportation agency.

Does anyone who’s read The Fountainhead remember Gail Wynand? I know, it’s a rhetorical question.

The author comes across as a figure quite similar to Wynand, although not as polished or grandiose as Ayn Rand’s characters usually are. However, the basic essence is the same. He is a self-taught man who’s learned all his lessons by extremely practical means — such as eavesdropping on customers’ conversations at the tea stall, offering to drive someone’s car for free just to find himself a job, and sitting by the street in Electronic City in Bangalore trying to understand where he could be useful in the outsourcing industry to name a few.

Gail Wynand’s success in The Fountainhead begins after he writes an editorial destroying a good man. The author — named as Balraam in The White Tiger — begins his entrepreneurial stint in a similar, although more literal manner.

The White Tiger is a raw, darkly humorous, and mocking account of how the lines between a poor man and an animal can get blurred out in some parts of India. If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire and think that you know bad things can get in some places, wait till you read about the life of poor people in Laxmangarh or New Delhi in The White Tiger. Wait till you read how Socialism, which is supposed to be a system meant to reduce the difference between the rich and the poor, ends up doing the exact opposite. You’ll see how it replaces the so called class difference present in a capitalist society with something unimaginably monstrous — a virtual master-slave relationship.

The author calls this phenomenon as the Rooster Coop. He describes it as,

“the roosters in the coop [at the slaughterhouse] smell the blood from above. 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… 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; 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.”

Later on, he says,

“that [to break out of the coop] would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature. It would, in fact, take a White Tiger.”

Balraam’s life takes him to a number of places, and he comes to a point where he begins to realize that he has only two choices — to remain imprisoned for the rest of his life like an animal he saw at the zoo or to do something bad, immoral, and definitely criminal, and buy a new lease on his life. Guess what he chooses.

Oh, but I almost forgot to mention! One of his nicknames is The White Tiger.

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