The White Tiger

I just finished reading the Booker Prize winning book by Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger.
Many patriotic Indian people may be offended by this novel and Amitabh Bachchan may be offended enough to do a blog protesting this book. This book also exposes the underbelly of Indian politics, caste system, and life of poor. Mr Adiga has been quite bold in his characterizations. I don;t know how accurate he is, but based on what I hear and observe during my trips to India, and what I remember from my life there, he has done an excellent job in characterizing it. A sample of that is:

..the finance minister declared that this year’s budget will include special incentives to turn our villages into high-technology aradises ..

This is the kind of news they feed us on All India Radio, night after night: and tomorrow at dawn it’ll be in the papers too. People just swallow this crap. Nigh after night, morning after morning, Amazing, isn’t it?

One thing about many of us from India, we become patriotic defensives tooo soon. We forget that until we realize what are the problems we face, we can not solve them. Identification and acceptance of a problem is the first step in its correction. By becoming defensive (stupid) patriots, we make sure that we reamin in the denial stage and don’t even think of solving a problem.

In any case, Aravida Adiga has definitely written an engrossing book that does show the underbelly of Indian system — that shows the darkside. Such books need to be taken seriously.