Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen.
How far Do you agree with the India represented in The novel The White Tiger?
I'm totally agree with the India represented in The novel The White Tiger, This single novel portrays the two faces of the dark and the light, the rich and the poor, the rural and the urban, the spiritual and the corrupt.
''Indian is two countries in one.
India of light and India of 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."
Balram explains to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese official, that two very different realities exist within India. The relatively prosperous cities along the coast and the lives of the wealthy elite make up the India of Light. The majority of India and its inhabitants, however, live in the Darkness through which the Ganga (Ganges) River flows. The Darkness traps the poor through oppression, neglect, and suffering. It is the India of Darkness that Balram wants to reveal to Wen Jiabao, while Indian politicians wish to hide it.
The story exposes these divides that surrounds India in the backdrop of economic prosperity and in the wake of the IT revolution. Unglamorous portrait of India was taken as an insult and indignity, but the author made it clear that:
"what I am trying to do-is not an attack on the country; it's about the greater process of self-examination"(Guardian).
It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.
Balram.
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you, sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
Balram.
Do you believe that Balram's story is the archetype of all stories of 'rags to riches'?
Yes I do, Everyone is a tiger in their own story. Balram considers himself as a successful entrepreneur but his ways are incorrect and cunning. He murders his master and took his money and name also. No matter how hard he gives justifications of his wrong actions, He is Bad.
Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique, deconstructive criticism aims to show that any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay' (Derrida, 1978, in Lodge, 1988, p. 108). Is it possible to do deconstructive reading of The White Tiger? How?
I'm not good at it but I can try.
It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
"I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse.
"Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.
"See, the Muslims have one god.
"The Christians have three gods.
"And we Hindus have 36,000,004 divine arses to choose from.
Balram speaks this lines at the very begging of the novel. The person whoever read this lines must first consider Balram as a highly religious man and praise him for his secularism but if we deconstruct this lines, we see come to know that Adiga through Balram's Character makes a Critic on all the religions.
The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.
Balram.
Go to Old Delhi, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.
Balram
It has a deep meaning the minds of servant are formed in such a way that even if they get a chance to deceive their masters they can't do it and if they do it they do small thefts nothing big. The subaltern mentality, the master / Slave relation where the slave can't escape his or her servant / slave mentality.
Write review of the film Adaptation of The White Tiger.
Just like Balram breaks the rooster coop and makes himself free, Ramin Bahrani tries the Indian audience to make free from old Master servant ideal relationship. Long story short, the story revolves around a successful entrepreneur Balram who murders his master and takes his name as well as money and becomes a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore. He calls himself the White Tiger. He is not a stereo typical, Ramu Kaka, Raju kind of ideal servant, our hero comes out from this ideal master / servant ideology and becomes master.
Some changes are done in the movie :
There is one fairly major change to the structure: the film begins with a cold open in which we see central characters Balram, Ashok, and Pinky involved in a car crash, an event that doesn't actually occur until the middle of the story.
The movie uses these emails as narration throughout, although it does not split that narration up into eight parts like the book does. Whereas the book does not date its events, the film opens in Delhi 2007, showing a teaser of a pivotal plot point before flashing forward to the modern day, where Balram is a comfortable businessman. The movie also makes Wen’s visit a much less ambiguous event, showing TV news hits of Wen in India and meeting with then–Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Unlike in the book, the near end of the movie shows Balram waiting outside a building in order to meet the premier and shake his hand, though Wen barely acknowledges him. The book never mentions whether Wen and Balram ever actually meet.
In the book, Balram’s parents didn’t even bother to name him at first, so his name became Munna, meaning “boy,” until a teacher gave him the name Balram. That detail is omitted from the movie. Balram is a precocious child who reads voraciously and excels at school, impressing even the education in, who compares Balram to the rarest of animals that only comes along once in a generation, i.e., the white tiger. Throughout the book, other characters also refer to him as such; in the film, the person who calls Balram “the white tiger” the most is Balram himself.
In the book, Balram sets out to become a professional driver after learning how much money personal chauffeurs for India’s plutocrats make, getting Kusum to invest in driving classes. After his lessons, Balram goes around to various houses and begs for a driving job until he just happens to stumble upon the residence of the Stork. Coincidentally, the Stork’s youngest son, Ashok, happens to have just returned to India from the U.S. and needs a driver. In the movie, Balram only pursues driving lessons after hearing about the return of Ashok to India, and deliberately seeks out the landlord’s residence.
Where the movie really deviates is in developing Ashok and Balram’s relationship: Unlike the book, the movie has them becoming something close to buddies, as Ashok tells Balram not to call him “sir” or “master,” and they are seen playing video games together and jamming to “Feel Good Inc.” in the car. In this way, the film more heavily highlights the homoerotic tones between the two that underlie the story in both book and film, current-day Balram sometimes refers to Ashok as his “ex”.
A horrifying turning point takes place on Pinky’s birthday. Balram drives them to a restaurant to celebrate; after dinner, a drunken Pinky then demands to drive the car, which leads to her striking and killing a small child. The movie makes the child’s death explicit, but in the book, it’s never actually established whether a child was killed, though a piece of green cloth found stuck in the car’s exterior implies that is the case.
After all this, in both novel and film, Pinky walks out on Ashok and has Balram drive her to the airport. Ashok becomes extremely upset, falling into an alcoholic stupor, while Balram takes care of him. The overall nature of their post-Pinky relationship develops differently on page and screen: In the movie, Balram takes Ashok to a nice restaurant and lies to him, claiming that Pinky cried when he drove her to the airport and said Ashok would do great things. In the book, Balram and Ashok don’t really have this warm relationship; even though Balram wants to be like a “wife” to Ashok, he’s mostly just cleaning up after his emotional drinking binges.
The endings of both the movie and film are more or less the same: Balram and Dharam make it to Bangalore, where they hide for a few weeks before resurfacing and exploring the city. Balram decides to get into the outsourcing business after noticing how many cars are needed to take workers to call centers and deciding he can provide that transportation service. Balram uses the money from Ashok’s red bag to bribe local police into cracking down on taxi services that already contract with the call centers, opening up the market for himself and his new venture, White Tiger Technology Drivers. In a sinister signoff worthy of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Balram, now an accomplished executive, reveals his new, assumed name: Ashok Sharma.
Slumdog Millionaire and The White Tiger :
Slumdog Millionaire' is a 'Fairy Tale' - whereas 'The White Tiger' is more realistic story of poor person's success in the New India.
Slumdog Millionaire' is an outsider view - whereas 'The White Tiger' is an insider's view. Adiga gives the bitter but the true picture of India while sometimes we feel that Dany Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is a typical bollywood movie, two brothers, one good and one bad, love story, surprisingly winning a game show and the meeting the lover at the end. It's just a typical Bollywoodish movie made by an American nothing new in that.
