Aravind Adiga's White Tiger focuses on the rise of "Munna," a boy so neglected in his childhood that nobody has really bothered to name him. "Munna" merely means "boy" in Hindi. Sitting in his small office, beneath a lavish chandelier, he is dictating a letter to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, to teach him about the reality behind the now-cliched image of the Indian entrepreneur. Of course, the letter will never arrive, that is clear from the outset, but it contains within it the whole of the life of Munna, AKA Balram, AKA "The White Tiger." The novel, though, is not about its narrator. He is merely a vehicle (an apt metaphor, since he he serves as a driver) to discuss India's tremendous wealth inequality, and the many social, political, religious, familial, and personal ties and systems that perpetuate it. Together, these create the "chicken coop" entrapping the poor of India, though the narrator argues that they hold the key to their cage.
Balram tells us that he might have called this book "The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian." He continues:
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences of politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of our old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep -- all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.The book is fiercely funny, with humor that grows darker as the plot moves forward, and while the humor never recedes entirely, at a certain point I would have preferred to stop laughing along with the narrator. But I didn't. The book is an antidote to the two narratives we get in the West about India: the up-and-coming superpower of technological knowhow, and the land of desperate poverty and disease. The book presents both in stark, sardonic terms, demonstrating clearly again and again the gap between The Darkness (the rural, poverty-hobbled villages) and The Light (the new, tech-fueled areas of Delhi and other major cities). And while Balram has indeed crossed this uncrossable gulf, the method he uses -- vicious and bloody murder -- highlights the impossibility of the crossing.
Read this book. It is now on my official Required Reading list.
