How can you change from a helpless rooster into a rare white tiger? In India, where people seem to be divided into these two broad categories, rather than many intricate castes, such transformations are quite unusual. At least according to Balram, the main character of a Booker Prize-winning book by Aravind Adiga The White Tiger, who narrates the story of his own self-made entrepreneurial rise from a compliant servant to an assertive business owner in India's business hub Bangalore.
It's an easy and enjoyable read, delivered in the form of letters Balram writes to China's prime minister in the run-up to his visit to India. As he charts his own journey from a stagnant village in India's backwater to Bangalore, where he now runs a successful taxi service for employees of the thriving outsourcing industry, he paints a bleak picture of India as a society. The narrative gets darker towards the end, culminating in moral choices redolent of nothing else than Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Balram is no academic and neither is his diagnosis of India's predicament. He sees the country as an overcrowded "rooster coop", with most people humbly waiting to be slain by those in power. The rich and the poor are clinically separated, the latter struggling to become servants to the former, which equates to getting a license to leave their wretched fate in the backward, filthy countryside. Corruption is endemic. It starts with teachers embezzeling government subsidies and goes up to the country's top brass in Delhi. Everything and everyone is "half-baked", sloppy and of low quality. This refers to education, health care, political system, infrastructure, law enforcement, you name it. There is the Darkness, where people cannot read and write, trust horrible superstitions and have neither the means nor the hopes to lift themselves from mud, and the Light, where people have "choice".
The pattern for people like Balram is to marry young, cash in the dowry, stay with the extended family and milk the water buffalo or get a back-breaking job in the field. Through luck and perseverance, Balram manages to become a driver for a wealthy family of coal industrialists and leaves his hometown for Delhi. Getting more and more streetwise and sensing his master's vulnerability, he plots to murder him and steal a small fortune that was meant to be delivered to some top politician as a bribe. What he says, he does and the loot sets him up as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. Paying an admittedly high price to pay, which includes sacrificing his family as his ex-employer's relatives take a bloody revenge, he becomes a free man.
The White Tiger is not an enticing portrait of India. It appears to be a place where tradition strangles the weakest in its firm grip while those above it benefit from this backwardness. Frustration originating from the debilitating lack of rightful means to improve an average life leads to a perverse sense of morality. Phoniness and social conventions conceal a deep-seated hatred and a desire to mete out vendetta-style punishment to those who are in power. It's an explosive, perverted mentality. Adiga seems to be tricking his readers by making Balram such a likable guy trapped in an damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation, despite the fact that he planned and executed a brutal murder. It's an indictment of a system whose failed mechanisms have become conducive to people justifying their wrongdoing for want of other instruments. I guess it's up to readers to decide whether the sorry social set-up of India is really enough to condone the way Balram pulls himself up by his bootstraps. It's certainly not for me.
With over 1.2bln people, India is by far the largest democracy in the world. An emerging economy, often compared to China in terms of its pace of change and potential, it has been mired in social problems. According to Amartya Sen, an Indian Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher, most development indicators confirm that India has been falling behind China quite badly in raising the quality of life of its people. Indian's rapid GDP growth has done little to alter the nation's average life expectancy, infant mortality or adult literacy rates, proving that its wealth is being unevenly distributed.
Another interesting fact is that India's economy is largely based on the outsourcing industry, which requires employees, especially in call centres, to take on a Western identity after intense and deep-going training. While accounting for much of the country's growth, it also causes quite an upset to the hearts and minds of usually young people employed in the business. They need to deal with the a sense of duality that hinges on exstinguishing their native ways of doing things and adapting a work-focused, phoney and probably fatiguing mask needed to serve Americans or Australians.
My first impressions of India upon reading The White Tiger have been somewhat toned down following the Guardian's interview with its author. Coming from a middle-class family of doctors in southern India and educated at Oxford, Aravind Adiga distances himself from Balram quite resolutely, both considering his moral choices and his analysis of India's reality. On the other hand, he likens himself to such writers as Balzac or Flaubert, who exposed the injustices of the early industrial era in France or England.
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