"The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga

The book deals with a serious subject - the plight of the poor in India - in a fast-moving, entertaining, caustic way. The book should be accessible to anyone (which I somehow suspect isn't the case with all Man Booker winners).

The criticism that the Wall Street Journal raised in today's paper is absurd. Somehow, it sees the book as critical of globalization. The book has very little to do with globalization, and if anything it is welcoming of it. It does not neglect to mention the non-stop construction, the call centers, etc. In fact, Balram (a.k.a. The White Tiger), the main character, seizes on the newly presented opportunities. Nor does it maintain, contrary to WSJ's review, that only the "rich" benefit from globalization.

The book is about poor villagers, for whom the reality is that they are predestined to die no better off than they were born, and about one man going to extreme ends to change that destiny. It's about corruption, it's about the millenia old traditions, it's about illiteracy, violence, debt, and religion, and how all these things prevent a poor villager to break out of what Balram calls the Rooster Coop.

I have no quarrel with WSJ's numbers, which indicate that there was a significant percentage increase of Indians living above the poverty line from 1981-2005 (18%). I also think that Adiga could have been more clear about who works at the call centers. (Is there a middle class? In the novel, Adiga talks about "masters" and "servants" and that 99.9 percent are servants while the remainder are masters. In this interview with the Guardian, he claims that 5% of Indians are well-off. The Independent cites him as putting the total of the underclass at 400 million.) But I think he makes it clear that there is a substantial underclass that is far from equipped (what, with debt bondage, disease, oppressive hierarchal societal structure) to benefit directly in a substantial way. The construction workers in the novel, for example, are not part of the modernity which they are building.

The one time I was traveling internationally, I was seated next to an Indian woman, who upon hearing my talk of a culture shock (on a trip to Western Europe!) suggested that for culture shocks, one should head to India. All in all, the book portrays India as a country that would be almost offensive to Western sensibilities. It does however make an eloquent case for the humanity of those for whom the very circumstances of their birth had seemed to take that humanity away. Most compellingly, it shows how a man with, at the outset, at best a mirky understanding of how the world around him works, slowly but surely figures it out, to the detriment of his masters.