Aravind Adiga

"India adalah negara yang dicetak oleh para manusia setengah matang."

Sesuai dengan blurb, The White Tiger menceritakan tentang pria bernama Balram yang membunuh majikannya sendiri. Balram adalah seorang sopir yang sejak kecilnya putus sekolah hingga bekerja serabutan — menjadi pemukul batu bara, manusia laba-laba, dan pelayan di warung teh. Dia kemudian kursus menjadi sopir untuk kemudian bekerja bersama Ashok. Ashok sendiri sama-sama berasal dari desa kumuh yang sama dengan Balram, tetapi show more nasib mereka berbeda. Ashok begitu dihormati Balram sampai kemudian dia memutuskan menggorok majikannya sendiri.
Kisah Balram secara sekilas menarik karena menggambarkan kesenjangan sosial dan kondisi carut-marut India. Namun secara tersurat Aravind Adiga menuliskan kritik terhadap Islamofobia yang begitu kuat di India.
Secara blak-blakan, penulis mengatakan empat penyair terbaik di dunia adalah penyair Muslim. Lewat sudut pandang Balram, penulis mengatakan ada tiga penyair Muslim yang dia hormati di dunia, antara lain Rumi, Iqbal, dan Mirza Ghalib. Bahkan, Balram terngiang-ngiang syair salah satu dari mereka:

"Sudah bertahun-tahun kau mencari kuncinya / Padahal pintunya selalu terbuka!"

Aravind Adiga seakan-akan mengatakan secara halus bahwa kesalahan India sulit maju (saat bukunya ditulis) adalah karena mengesampingkan kaum Muslim di tanah mereka. Warga India masih saja bagaikan kaum tersesat yang membutuhkan keajaiban di depan mata untuk bisa bergerak maju, padahal keajaiban itu hadir dalam bentuk umat Muslim di sekitarnya.
Namun sesuai dengan babak akhir buku, tercerminlah bagaimana India akan terus bergerak: berusaha maju dengan konstruksi Islamofobia. show less

Modern Mumbai: buildings are going up, the gap between haves and have nots is widening, and corruption is everywhere. The poor are wretched, the rich are manipulative, and the middle, such as the community of tenants in the apartment building in this book, well, they’re in the middle.

A rich developer who has himself risen from poverty gives them an offer they can’t refuse for their properties. Unfortunately, one of the tenants, an old teacher who has lost his daughter and his wife, show more stubbornly declines, and without his approval the entire project cannot move forward. The pressure mounts from the builder, who has been known to use strongarm tactics in the past, as well as the other tenants, who fear missing out on a big payment.

All of the characters are nuanced, and to Adiga’s credit, there is no absolute “good” and “evil” here. As with his other books, it’s a realistic, unflinching portrait of India – an India that is on the rise, but one which is often cruel, and going through what in the most optimistic sense would be called growing pains. The writing is quite good; I just wish the book had been tightened up as it drags on a bit.

Quotes:
I love this one from the Bhagavad Gita at the outset:
“I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal, indestructible.”

On adversity:
“Now it seemed to him, oddly enough, he had spent his forty-four years in Bombay exactly in the manner prescribed by the Hindu philosophers: like a lotus in a dirty pond, be in the world but not of it. Nothing had made him cry for years. Not even his wife’s death. Was he really sorry that she had died? He did not know. The hypodermic needle of the outside world had bent at his epidermis and never penetrated.”

On hard work:
“Each movement of his bony jaws spoke of fatigue; the permanent fatigue of men who have no one to care about them when they work and no one to care about them after they work. The thin body broadcast a raw animal silence. Middle-aged? No. His hair was greying at the edges, but youth had only recently been exorcised from his face. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the most.”

On India:
“A three-quarters majority vote in favour may be enough, legally speaking. But the law spoke ambiguously on this matter. As on most matters, the lawyer added. The law in Mumbai was not blind: far from it, it had two faces and four working eyes and saw every case from both sides and could never make up its mind.”

“In the dark dirty valley under the concrete overpass half-naked labourers pushed and slogged, with such little hope that things might improve for them. Yet they pushed: they fought. As Mary was fighting to keep her hut by the nullah. And maidservants like her across Vakola were fighting to keep their huts.
Strips of incandescence from behind the buildings fell on the road, and people crowded into them as if they were the only points of fording the traffic. Illuminated in these strips, the straining coolies looked like symbols: hieroglyphs of a future, a future that was colossal. Masterji gazed at the light behind the dirty buildings. It looked like another Bombay waiting to be born.”

On kids:
“Guarav glared. His sharp features and oval face, except for the fat that had accumulated on them, resembled his father’s: but when he frowned, a dark slant furrow cut into his brow, like a bookmark left there by his mother.”

On men and women:
“She kissed him on the cheek.
The wetness remained on Shah’s cheek and he recognized it for what it was: ambition. The girl didn’t just want a hair salon, she wanted everything: all his money, all his buildings. All his money above and below the earth. Marriage.
…
How there is nothing small, nothing ignoble in life. A man may not find love in the sacrament of marriage but he has found it with a woman he coupled with on his office sofa: just as a seed spat out by the gutter pipe, sucking on sewage, can grow into a great banyan.”

On old age:
“’I used to live on this juice when I came to Bombay, Shanmugham. Live on it.’
‘Sir: they use dirty water to make the ice. Jaundice, diarrhoea, worms, God knows what else.’
‘I know. I know.’
The bright, fast, musical wheels turned once again, crushing the cane – Shah imagined bricks rising, scaffolding erected, men hoisted miles into the air on such tinkling energy. If only he were new to Bombay again: if only he could drink that stuff again.”

On sexy voices:
“A husky cackle: it made Shah shiver. One of the things he loved about Rosie – her voice always had its knickers down.”

On women:
“…why, when she is worried about your interest in her, will a woman do the very things that will cause your interest to drop further?” show less

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga tells the story of one’s man’s life dealing with the injustice of the caste system in India and of how he escaped and became an entrepreneurial success. This is not an uplifting story. I was not left with a feeling of hope even though the way in which the story was told was light and humorous.

An Indian entrepreneur, Valram Halwai, tells the story through a letter that he writes to the Chinese Premier who is slated to visit and has suggested he would like show more to speak to an Indian entrepreneur because China does not have any at this point. This is pointed out on page 2:

“Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, DOES have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology.”

This sets the stage for the book and introduces one of the main themes, which is the lack of basic necessities in India and this leads into the book’s major premise, India’s caste system and the world of difference between the haves and have nots, “The Light and The Dark”.

Valram is born into a very poor family. His father is a rickshaw driver, his family lives in a shack and they have absolutely nothing. He has a couple of years of school but it becomes apparent that he needs to go to work to help support the family. His caste is meant to be producers of sweets so his grandmother determines he should work in the tea shop. However, Valram sets his sights much higher. He wants to be a driver for the wealthy and that is how he ends up working for Mr. Ashok, his wife Pinky Madam, his father The Stork and his brother Mukesh. This is where Valram learns the lessons of life that determine the course he eventually follows.

Examples of the sad state of affairs in India today are prevalent throughout the book:
1. Government officials and politicians must be paid off by businessmen in order for commerce to take place
2. Those stuck at the bottom layers of the caste system seldom escape from it and are actually held down by others who are in the same strata
3. Corruption among the police is widespread
4. Although his boss complains that because of Halram’s limited education, “he probably has what…two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I’ll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy to characters like these.” (page 8) Yet the fingerprints of the illiterate are taken from them to use on ballots at election time and they never actually get to vote themselves.
5. The “servants” of the rich are treated with disdain and are not able to maintain their dignity

Valram finally decides that there is only one way for him to escape his circumstances and therein lies the crux of the situation. The reader must decide if he was justified in doing what he had to do to escape. The author provides a lot of opportunities for moral lessons but leaves the reader holding the bag. Cynical, irreverent and very, very funny. 2008 Man Booker Prize Winner. Highly recommended. show less

On a superficial level, reading the work The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga will introduce readers to a side of India that's much different than the usual glamour of contrived gurus and opulent Bollywood. The White Tiger is portrayal of the lingering, residual effects of India's caste system on its slow yet inevitable push toward technological modernity.

Adiga's novel focuses on one man's breakthrough from "the Darkness" of backward rural poverty to "the Light" of urban entrepreneurship and show more what americans would probably describe as middle class luxury. The story centers on Balram Halwai's struggle to accept more of life than his caste will allow. Born without a true name, Balram progresses from lowly sweet-shop worker to personal driver and servant to becoming a "respectable" businessman of Bangalore. As with all good stories, the plot advances with the rationalization of one's choices and sacrifices. Sacrifices and choices involving losing one's family, one's humility, and murder.

Adiga adds several layers of philosophical complexity throughout the novel. One the one hand, this a work outlining the persistence of slavery, not only in Indian culture, but modern culture as well. Balram is an aberration, an Indian who defies his culture not only in the pursuit of "entrepreneurship" but also the pursuit of being a free and true man. Adiga compares most Indians living in the lower castes to being chickens suffocating in a great coop, unable and even unwilling and perhaps proud of it, to better their lot in life. It is only when Balram finally realizes in his anger that the rich always get the best in life and the poor always get the leftovers that he makes the choices that cannot be reversed.

The greater psychological slavery realized by Balram is perhaps akin to something Nietzsche may have said regarding god being dead. Adiga certainly puts it to the reader to decide whether Balram's choices are truly necessary to become a free man in a highly corrupt India. Whether they are or not, such is the plight in the darkest corners of India, for those truly grasping for a better life. It is certainly compelling, a story with choices that multitudes are facing every day. Excellent read. show less