I finally got around to reading the Man Booker winner from 2008. Savagely
funny and often just savage, it's a critique of contemporary India from the
viewpoint of a rich man's chauffeur. We know from the start that the
chauffer, Balram Halwai, has murdered his employer, and although born in a servant's caste, he is nowu an "entrepreneur." It's a withering look at
corruption and inequality in India. I have no idea if it is a fair portrayal, but it was an entertaining read. I don't know if it screamed "award winner" to me, but it certainly presented an original voice. ( )

A seering glimpse into the Indian underworld. The voice of the protagonist is unique and compelling. A great read! ( )

Written as a series of letters addressed from an Indian “social entrepreneur” to the Chinese president, The White Tiger is a startling, ferocious novel about the one-two punch of neocolonialism and capitalism that has landed squarely on the chin of the developing world. The narrator of this horrific (and occasionally hilarious) tale is Balram Halwai, a young man who has taken the American narrative of the “self-made man” to its ruthless, logical conclusion. Born in a filthy rural slum to a low-caste family, Halwai is determined to move up in the world. He learns to drive and manages to talk his way into a career as a driver for a wealthy, cosmopolitan young couple. Halwai carefully disguises his loathing for India’s elites until his employer threatens to tear down the life he has constructed for himself, transforming his distaste into a murderous rage.


Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for this, his debut novel, amid a great deal of controversy. TheWhite Tiger is completely unlike the Indian novels that most Americans know: saris do not swirl, exotic spices do not perfume the air, and there is no magical realism to soften Adiga’s blows he pummels us with the raw and wretched inequality he describes. While some readers and reviewers were upset by his unglamorous (perhaps even uncharitable) depictions of poverty and greed in the third world, I was stunned and haunted by its honesty and power. ( )

The book is written as a letter to a Chinese diplomat, a device that allows the writer to not only tell his story but also explain Indian society and how it works. It's a fascinating look at the have-nots in India or anywhere and what keeps them there. What has to be given up to shift out of that class. I also thought that the nature of his "master" contributed to the narrater's ability to imagine a different world since the "master" wasn't comfortable with his position either. An interesting and thought provoking book which presented look at society using three dimensional characters. ( )

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga tells the story of one’s man’s life dealing with the injustice of the caste system in India and of how he escaped and became an entrepreneurial success. This is not an uplifting story. I was not left with a feeling of hope even though the way in which the story was told was light and humorous.

An Indian entrepreneur, Valram Halwai, tells the story through a letter that he writes to the Chinese Premier who is slated to visit and has suggested he would like to speak to an Indian entrepreneur because China does not have any at this point. This is pointed out on page 2:

“Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, DOES have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology.”

This sets the stage for the book and introduces one of the main themes, which is the lack of basic necessities in India and this leads into the book’s major premise, India’s caste system and the world of difference between the haves and have nots, “The Light and The Dark”.

Valram is born into a very poor family. His father is a rickshaw driver, his family lives in a shack and they have absolutely nothing. He has a couple of years of school but it becomes apparent that he needs to go to work to help support the family. His caste is meant to be producers of sweets so his grandmother determines he should work in the tea shop. However, Valram sets his sights much higher. He wants to be a driver for the wealthy and that is how he ends up working for Mr. Ashok, his wife Pinky Madam, his father The Stork and his brother Mukesh. This is where Valram learns the lessons of life that determine the course he eventually follows.

Examples of the sad state of affairs in India today are prevalent throughout the book:
1. Government officials and politicians must be paid off by businessmen in order for commerce to take place
2. Those stuck at the bottom layers of the caste system seldom escape from it and are actually held down by others who are in the same strata
3. Corruption among the police is widespread
4. Although his boss complains that because of Halram’s limited education, “he probably has what…two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I’ll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy to characters like these.” (page 8) Yet the fingerprints of the illiterate are taken from them to use on ballots at election time and they never actually get to vote themselves.
5. The “servants” of the rich are treated with disdain and are not able to maintain their dignity

Valram finally decides that there is only one way for him to escape his circumstances and therein lies the crux of the situation. The reader must decide if he was justified in doing what he had to do to escape. The author provides a lot of opportunities for moral lessons but leaves the reader holding the bag. Cynical, irreverent and very, very funny. 2008 Man Booker Prize Winner. Highly recommended. ( )

I didn’t like this book when I started it. Even when I was browsing it in the bookshop, I wasn’t that keen – I only bought it because it was half-price and it had won the Booker Prize. Surprising, then, that it ended up being one of the best books I’ve read in recent months.

The style grated initially. It’s written as a series of letters from an Indian entrepreneur to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and starts off full of stuff like “Let me tell you about my admiration for the great nation of China…” Fortunately this tails off after a while, and you can forget about Wen Jiabao and listen to the story of Balram’s rise from servant to successful businessman. And in the end, the narrative device does have a clever effect: it allows Balram to talk naturally about his life while also explaining aspects of Indian life that might not otherwise be clear to a foreigner. Wen Jiabao is a stand-in for us, the foreign reader who needs things explained to him. I don’t know if this was a conscious choice by Adiga to give his book both authenticity and international appeal; perhaps Wen Jiabao’s presence has a completely different purpose, and seeing him as a stand-in for me is just Western arrogance! But it works, anyway.

Despite the brief description I gave above, Balram’s story is not a traditional, uplifting rags to riches tale. It’s much darker than that, and much more real. In the traditional rags to riches tale, the protagonist faces lots of obstacles from his humble upbringing, but succeeds through strength of character in overcoming them and achieving the success he or she deserves. The problem with these tales is that they reinscribe some pervasive myths – that being successful is about strength of character, and that riches come to those who deserve them. Accepting these myths leaves you with a feeling that, conversely, those who stay poor must somehow also deserve it – they must somehow have lacked the strength of character to rise above their situation.

Adiga’s book challenges this narrative, replacing it with a darker and, to me, truer one. Balram becomes rich not through virtue or hard work – both of these qualities make him an ideal servant. He gets rich by lying, stealing and killing. This makes him like the other rich characters in the book, who live off extracting rents from the poor, killing those who rebel against them, paying bribes to government ministers, etc. Balram compares India to a rooster coop, in which the majority of people are trapped but don’t try to escape.

"A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse."

Clearly, this is a book about India, and some things are specific to India. The family, for example, is a strong unit in India, and Balram says it is the main way of keeping people trapped – they feel an obligation to their family, so will work hard and not rebel. When Balram does rebel, he assumes that the family of the rich man he murdered will kill all of his family in revenge – it’s the way it works. He does it anyway, because it’s the only way he can see to escape. He must sacrifice everything, from his honesty and morality and upbringing to his entire family. He must be utterly selfish.

I think it would be a mistake to see the book as being only about India, though. Of course the divide between rich and poor there is more extreme than in most other places on Earth. The servitude in which millions of poor people are trapped is almost unimaginable. But it’s still true everywhere, isn’t it, that a tiny percentage of people own the majority of the wealth? Are those people really so superior to the rest of us that they deserve that level of wealth? Do we really live in a meritocracy? Isn’t the accident of birth still incredibly important? Doesn’t every country have its own version of the rooster coop?

Nothing’s black and white, of course, and this is one of the virtues of the book. Although it makes strong points about inequality and justice, the characters still feel real. In a review like this things are necessarily summarised and simplified, but over the course of the novel the characters are fully fleshed out — the rich people are not just symbols of evil and the poor are not all virtuous. Adiga explores the complexities and contradictions while keeping his eye firmly set on his larger targets. I’m not always able to see what the Booker Prize judges see, but in this case I certainly can. ( )

I thought this book was fantastic when I first started it - initially Balram is a narrator who is as charming as he is unreliable - but it became a slog about halfway through. I'm still trying to put my finger on the reason why, but it seems like the story Adiga was trying to tell and the point he was trying to make kept getting in the way of one another. This gets tiresome, even at less than 300 pages. ( )

I thought this book was fantastic when I first started it - initially Balram is a narrator who is as charming as he is unreliable - but it became a slog about halfway through. I'm still trying to put my finger on the reason why, but it seems like the story Adiga was trying to tell and the point he was trying to make kept getting in the way of one another. This gets tiresome, even at less than 300 pages. ( )

I thought this book was fantastic when I first started it - initially Balram is a narrator who is as charming as he is unreliable - but it became a slog about halfway through. I'm still trying to put my finger on the reason why, but it seems like the story Adiga was trying to tell and the point he was trying to make kept getting in the way of one another. This gets tiresome, even at less than 300 pages. ( )

Perhaps you've heard it said that India is the world's next superpower: a nation of economic and technological progress that will soon succeed Western countries on the world stage. If so, Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger might make you think twice. Winner of the Booker Prize in 2008, this novel is a vicious, literary exposé of the delusion of 'progress' in modern India. Our narrator, Balram, splits the country into two halves: an 'India of Darkness' and an 'India of Light'. While Adiga's evocation of the poverty in the former is brutally vivid, it is his portrayal of the latter that will really grab his readers' attention. The India of his novel is a society that functions with mechanical amorality, where rich and poor alike are so habituated to the dog-eat-dog corruption that nobody thinks to question the status quo.

For all its atmospheric bustle, the novel is filled with the empty promise of change; a feeling that our narrator only partially acknowledges. Having titled himself 'The White Tiger', he views his own rise to the top of the food chain with a satisfaction that Adiga quietly subverts. As the wheels of this society continue their foul cycles – crime, poverty, betrayal – the reader comes to realise that its progress is not progress at all, and that the jungle will always be just that: a jungle.

As engaging as the subject matter is, it is Balram's narration above all that gives this study of modern India its twisted charisma. His straight-to-the-bone comments about everything from religion to democracy to the behaviour of Westerners will elicit wry smiles from the toughest of readers. Somehow, these 'life lessons' manage to be amusingly oversimplified and remarkably incisive at the same time. Whether you love him or hate him – or an indecisive mix of the two, as is more probable – the way Balram keeps the novel speeding along is difficult to resist.

Eye-opening on so many levels, The White Tiger is literature as it should be: topical, memorable and completely readable. Adiga's densely packed portrait of Indian society unravels in the mind for days afterwards. If it is half the country he paints it to be, urgent intervention is definitely called for. ( )

This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. It's set in India, and the protagonist is a man who is a entrepreneur with his own business. He's writing the story, in installments each night, to send to the Chinese Premier who is visiting India. He says he wants to explain the real India, not the one that a visitor will be shown. He tells of growing up poor in a small, rural town, getting a job as a servant, and then finally breaking out into being his own boss.

I only recall 3 people treating him with any kindness — one of whom he kills —
and he only treats one person, a nephew, well. It's not what I'd call a fun or uplifting book to read. It was fascinating to read the portrait of Delhi, Bangalore, and village life. The portrayal of the police and the political system is damning, and in an interview with Adiga that I read, he says that he didn't consider it exaggerated.

quite wicked and revealing of real workings of Indian society [as shown by this author of course!] Very easy to read which was a surprise. ( )

Reviewed by Mr. Kome ( )

This is a deserving winner of the Man Booker Prize. It's a tale of corruption and murder, and the stunning contradiction that is modern day India. Adiga writes with gusto and a huge amount of confidence, and what he has to say is very useful in coming to an understanding of what India is really like. Forget the glossy photos you see in the tourist guides!

This is also one of the wittiest stories I've read this year, full of memorable lines and delectable observations. ( )

This is an enticing glimpse into another slice of life. The hero is sympathetic and engaging and yet as the consequences of his actions play out he changes and becomes increasingly alienated. A great read. ( )

This book being one of those intensely love it/hate it ones, and having raised quite a controversy when it won the Booker, I made an effort to reserve my judgment until the very last page. It never redeemed itself, though. A plot out of a cheap thriller, and banal writing. And if it was supposed to portray the corruption, the perverse wealth amid overwhelming poverty in India, there are other novels of the same theme which do a much better job than this. A Fine Balance (which was shortlisted but never won the Booker) is one example. ( )

I forgot where I got to know about this book, but I do remember that as soon as I read what it is about I was interested in it right away. A couple of months later I was at the airport waiting for my flight back home, and as I always do I stopped at the bookstore. As soon as I went in, the first thing I saw was a huge pile of The White Tiger books, so I obviously had to get it.

Balram Halwai is an Indian entrepreneur. When he hears that Premier Wen Jiabao of China is going to visit his country, Balram decides to tell him about the life in India that he will no doubt not be told about on his visit. That is the life of an entrepreneur coming from a lower caste. In his letter, Balram tells Premier Jiabao about his childhood in poverty, his life in Delhi as a servant to Mr Ashok, how he became a wanted man, and ultimately an entrepreneur in Bangalore.

The journey of Balram to become an entrepreneur brings out the extreme difference between the poor and the rich in India. I found Balram to be quite an interesting character. He hated the people that were corrupt and immoral, and did whatever it takes to get what they wanted, but in the end he too became one of these people. However, the sad thing is that it doesn't seems that there was a clean way of getting out of the rooster coop he was in, there are simply no opportunities for someone that is born in 'the darkness' to free himself. I think this is the message that the author wanted to get across, and he did it by first getting the reader's empathy for Balram, so when his actions become unspeakable you still feel for him and believe that he had to do what he did to gain his freedom. What I thought was quite unsettling was his views on white people, and it makes me wonder if that is a common belief amongst these people. This was an easy and fast read, sometimes being satirical too, even though the topic is not a light one and it raised many questions while I was reading it.

This is the first book I have read about this topic, and although I have watched the movie 'Slumdog Millionaire', I didn't quite understand what it meant to belong to a lower caste in India before I read this book. Of course I also remind myself that this is fiction, but it seems that this has become such a popular topic to write about lately that it feels like these authors want to get a message across. ( )

While I enjoyed reading Adiga's award-winning book, I discovered that I couldn't remember a lot about the story only a few weeks after finishing it. It just wasn't "sticky" for me, to use a Malcolm Gladwell term. Perhaps it's because I know very little about the culture and lifestyles in India. I did, however, enjoy the unique format the author used to spin the tale. ( )

Set in the backstreets of India the tale of boy trying to make it against the odds and expectation. It's told via a series of letters to the Chinese Premier in which the writer tries to expose the "truth" about India as opposed to the view of the country the Premier will be shown on the visit he's about to make.
It works well although I'd had enough of it by the time I'd finished the book, I felt it ran out of new things to say. None the less and interesting structure and an enjyable read. ( )

En rolig och intressant berättelse. Författaren gör det "mytiska" Indien verkligare, jag njuter av hans beskrivningar av miljöerna... Vanligtvis brukar jag tycka miljöskildringar är urtråkigt att läsa, kanske klarar jag det bättre den här gången för att de inte är så sentimentalt "blommiga" utan raka och realistiska.
Det känns som jag lärde mig mycket om Indien. ( )

Balram Halwai is not the first name he has used, but it is the one he was given in school. He prefers to be known as The White Tiger, a rare creature that is born only once in a generation. He feels he is rare creature himself, one who has thrown off his rich master and become master of his own destiny. He is born a poor boy, the son of a rickshaw-puller and manages to become a driver after being yanked out of school and initally working in a tea room. This is a real turning point for him as things turn out.

He begins as the second driver but soon uses his wits to progress further up the career ladder. He loves his master who treats him well (for the most part), but soon realises when he accompanies him to Deli that he will never gain the riches and freedom he has. He decides to take his destiny into his own hands, doing the unthinkable.

I thought this was excellent and well deserving of the 2008 Man Booker Prize. It's a very sad, moving story that often has the reader grimacing, yet it is told in a very light hearted manner making the negative parts more easy to swallow. I think it is this that makes it so good, that the bad elements don't bog you down and depress you so much. You sympathise with Balram and I felt I could understand what he did (although not condone it). Recommended. ( )

An entertaining story, and perhaps, an interesting look into India's culture. Unfortunately, I know nothing about India myself and have read mixed reviews about the story as an accurate portrayal of Indian life from people who actually grew up there. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it a fascinating and highly emotive read. What appears at first glance to be a rags-to-riches story becomes so much more. The descriptive writing made me feel as if I were actually in India; the sights and smells and tastes came through so clearly. By the end, I found myself incredibly angry about the corruption and injustices faced by the poor of India. Very thought provoking. ( )

Great novel about social injustice, morality, corruption and politics.
Provocative. ( )