‘You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots. The inspector pointed his cane straight at me. He grew up in a family too poor even to give him a proper name, so his schoolteacher calls him Balram (“he was the sidekick of the god Krishna”), and a school inspector, impressed by Balram’s ability, gives him the identity which will fuel his story.

Here, our narrator is Balram Halwai, an Indian “social entrepreneur” and the White Tiger of the title. To describe it in relation to last year’s Booker Prize titles, The White Tiger has superficial similarities to both Animal’s People (a ‘quirky’ first person narrative) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a one-sided exchange between two people).

(What was that about ‘geographical balance’ again?) If you think I’m laying a not-too-subtle hint here by lumping him in as one of many others, with nothing distinguishing of his own, then you may have a point. Amid cockroaches, call-centres, thirty-six-million gods, slums, shopping malls, and crippling traffic jams, Balram comes to see how the Tiger might slip the bars of his cage.Aravind Adiga is one of five debut novelists on this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist, and one of four from the Indian subcontinent. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi at the wheel of a Honda. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. Balram was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. Meet Balram Halwai, the White Tiger : servant, philosopher, entrepreneur. You know more about him than his father and mother they knew his foetus, but you know his corpse. Here s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. The anti-Slumdog Millionaire Hollywood Reporter ***NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX PRODUCTION STARING PRIYANKA CHOPRA AND PRODUCED BY AVA DUVERNAY***Īs angry, smart and dark as Parasite. ***NOMINATED FOR AN ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY*** Category: Literature Literary Fiction Literary Fiction-Lfi

The white tiger book pages