No Beakdipping!

I just finished this really great (one proof: it won 2008’s Man Booker Prize) book called The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga:

Centred on India and its main character, Balram Halwai’s rise from “village teashop waiter to success as an entrepreneur in the alienated, post-industrial, call-centre hub of Bangalore.”, the novel spoke of, among many things, India’s: corruption, politics, social hierarchy, i.e. castes, divide (the Darkness vs. the Light; Men with Big Bellies vs. Men with Small Bellies), widespread poverty, slavery system, pollution, etc.

It’s a grabbing story that’s supposed to shed more light on the life conditions and stories we don’t hear a lot about. Just like Slumdog Millionaire, I think (I’m yet to watch the movie).

From The Sunday Times:

Aravind Adiga's extraordinary and brilliant first novel takes the form of a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, from Balram Halwai, the Bangalore businessman who is the self-styled “White Tiger” of the title.

On the eve of a state visit by Jiabao, our entrepreneur Halwai wishes to impart something of the new India to the Chinese premier - “out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage and drug abuse”.

Halwai's lesson about the new India is drawn from the rags-to-riches story of his own life. For Halwai, the son of a rural rickshaw-puller, is from the “Darkness”: “Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well-off. But the river brings darkness to India - the black river.”

The black river is the Ganges, beloved of the sari-and-spices tourist image of India. (“No! - Mr Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.”)

I also found it funny how the book repeatedly used derogatory terms such as “dip his beak” (it took me a while to get the meaning), and how “chewing paan” —something like pinang here in Brunei?—and then spitting out the “excretory” kept being mentioned by Balram Halwai in his ‘letters’; paan-chewing seemed like the normal daily thing to do by the poor Indians mentioned in the story.

Last excerpt direct from the book:

I thought, “What a miserable life he’s had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job as a driver – and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one that I will ever be.”
Part of me wanted to get up and apologize to him right there and say, “You go and be a driver in Delhi. You never did anything to hurt me. Forgive me, brother.”
I turned to the other side, farted, and went back to sleep.