Murder, he wrote. Review on White Tiger, The - Aravind Adiga

Flash

My father killed my mother in a drunken rage when I was five. My little sister died while I was looking after her. We need money to get our field back from the landlord. My stepfather beat me with hot rods to get me to work harder in the field

I have left my children behind – there’s no food because of the floods.Just some of the things that I have heard from the maidservants who have helped me bring up my kids. These people who come into my home for a few days, a few weeks, sometimes a few years, live in my well-defined world and then disappear.

I never hear what happens to them when they go back to their villages. Its another world to me. **It’s the Darkness.

Flash

Yes, we’ve designed a smart chip – we’ll be in production next year. We have an idea for a new energy saving device – we would like to start incubation. Our group is working for developing a fast diagnosis for TB

I got selected for an ivy league management college. These many CAT admissions, I want to package software, whoa, the list goes on.Flashes of conversations with students and alumni. These are our (fledgling) entrepreneurs – incubating their ideas in colleges, laboratories, tech companies. Another world – a world of light and hope.

*Why am I even talking about these two worlds in the same breath?

1. Because the existence of one merges, overlaps and sometimes is necessary for the survival of the other

   
   




2. Because of this book that outlines the huge gap between these two worlds that exist side-by-side in India, knowing of and about each other – just enough to serve each other – to survive.

   
   

The white tiger is a book about someone who comes from world 1, gores into world 2 and calls himself an entrepreneur. What stands between the two worlds is nothing but desperation, a willingness to cross over into an unknown world – oh, and of course murder.

So what happens is this, good old Balram with a cunning mind in the village serves his master in whichever way required. Encountering the freedom of the city, the glamour of the rich world, a weak master and greed - succumbs. Plans and commits cold blooded murder. Escapes, lives with his conscience, generates more money with his blood money. Finis.

There is nothing great or remarkable about any of these events – either in India or any of the so called developed countries.

So what is new about The white Tiger?

An unadulterated look into the criminal mind** - what motivates it (a boiling rage at the inherent unfairness of it all), what drives it (a desire to be part of the other world), what it fears (all his relatives being put to death after murdering his master) and how it overcomes, finally gives in to rage, steps over.

While doing all this, he almost gets you to see the how he justifies it all. You get a look into how an unscrupulous man is an unscrupulous “good” man. But still a murderer.