I never intended to read this book because people responded to it the same way they responded to Slumdog Millionaire…with absolute adoration because it showed the pale faces the “real” side of an ethnicity that they wouldn’t otherwise see. But I was stranded in a hotel without a book for two weeks and I took what was offered to me. Some people feel amiss without their phone, I feel amiss without a book.
The book was great until the end frustrated me so much that it made me rethink that decision. The end was so shocking and abrupt it was like slamming into a brick wall after running at full speed. You’re totally unprepared for the blow. What concerns me is that this book is so popular that there will be many copycats of this type of ending. It would be a shame if my premonition comes true because you can only run into a brick wall but once. Then you learn the lesson and move on.
The White Tiger features Balram, an entrepreneur, based in Bangalore, India… Electronics City, Phase 1, Bangalore, India to be exact. And I read the book while staying in Electronics City, Phase 1, Bangalore, India. Too bad the book had nothing to do with Bangalore because the book was really about Delhi and the Darkness.
The book follows the journey of one enterprising man travelling from the Darkness, as one of the many impoverished youths in India, to the Light as an entrepreneur. At first I found the writing a little stilted but the author was writing from the pen of a lifelong servant whose mastery of prose came secondhand. And, after being in India for a while, the way Indians in general structure their sentences is awkward to the ear of an American. That awkwardness dissipated the more I interacted with Indians during my stay. It seemed the longer I stayed in India, the more fluid Balram became.
The author brought us an intimate portrayal of an Indian servant’s life. His secret wants and desires would make a master look twice at the staff they allow free range in their home. From the eyes of a servant, I could see how cruel the elite could be and it made me put more of an effort to be kind to the staff working in my hotel. I got so engrossed in how Balram saw life in India versus how I was experiencing it as one of those elite people; I almost forgot this was fiction. Correction, I have forgotten that this is fiction and I constantly look at my drivers wondering if they have the same thoughts as Balram. Do all servants have these thoughts or just drivers? I kept assessing if someone was a “landlord” or not as I surveyed Indian people. And it made me think about Indian men’s beaks more often than I like to admit.
The problem I have now is that this book has totally warped the way I look at Indian people. Since I was reading an Indian author’s portrayal of the backside of India, I took it all as true. But it is only one image of the complex tapestry that is India. From my own experiences, I know that India has some extremely rich people but a whole heck of a lot of poor people. And there is a growing middle class in between. There is more than one true image of India and I have only intimately researched one.
