About the author
Aravind Adiga (born 23 October 1974) is an Indian writer and journalist. He studied English Literature at Columbia University, New York, and gained an M.Phil. at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Since 2000, he has worked as a journalist, first as a financial correspondent in New York, then returning to India in 2003 to work as a correspondent for TIME magazine.
Other works
Adiga's second book, Between the Assassinations, was released in India in November 2008 and in the US and UK in mid-2009.
His third book, Last Man in Tower, was published in the UK in 2011.
His next novel, Selection Day, was published on 8 September 2016.
Amnesty published in 2020 speaks of the pathetic condition of immigrants.
Book: The White Tiger
The White Tiger is the debut novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was first published in 2008 and won the 40th Man Booker Prize in the same year.
The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India's class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy. It is about the journey of How the Balram became a successful Entrepreneur. Balram's story, though, is a tale of bribery, corruption, skulduggery, toxic traffic jams, theft and murder.
"'You were looking for the key for years/But the door was always open!'"
How far do you agree with the India represented in the novel The White Tiger?
In the past six decades the turbulent changes that took place for the betterment of Indian society, have reversed the long-established order, and the old securities of life.
Social condition of poor people: -
a lot of poorer Indians are left confused and perplexed by the new Indian that is being formed around them. Author of the novel, Aravind Adiga in an interview with the BBC said;
“The White Tiger is the story of a poor man in today’s India, one of the many hundreds of millions who belong to the vast Indian under class; people who live as labourers, as servants, as chauffeurs and who by and large do not get represented in Indian entertainment, in Indian films, in Indian books. My hero-or rather my Protagonist-Balram Halwai is one of these faceless millions of poor Indians” (Aravind Adiga in an interview with BBC).
Education system: -
The school inspector promises to arrange a scholarship and proper schooling for the young boy, but, of course, he was pulled out of school and forced to work in a tea shop by his family. Through the desolate character of the young lad, the writer represents every village boy who is constrained to swathe the sweetness of his life with the ludicrousness of the crude truth.
Economical inequality:
Balram no son of the village will ever feel sorry for the situation one is in for they know their enormous potential and their prevailing fortitude.
“But pay attention, Mr. Premier! Fully formed fellows, after twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives. Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay” (Adiga 11)
Novel throws light on the lives of rickshaw-pullers in India. Balram’s father, in the novel, dies of tuberculosis. Now, this is a make-believe death of a make-believe figure, but underlying it is a piece of appalling reality, the fact that nearly thousand Indians, most of them poor, die every day from tuberculosis in India.
People in rural India are denied decent healthcare and education. Balram’s voice shows the economic inequalities of contemporary India when he says:
“A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank……. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen” (Adiga 26-27)
Discrimination between poor and Rich:
A world where beggars without a home share the streets with workers in call centers for U.S corporations, where the apartment complexes of the rich have extensive underground quarters where the servants sleep in cramped and dirty dormitories. Where servants can be locked away for the crimes of the rich and powerful. Balram tells about lives of servants in Delhi:
"….in India every apartment block, every house, every hotel is built with servant’s quarters- sometimes at the back, and sometimes underground----a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids, and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep0, and wait. When our masters wanted us, an electric bell began to ring throughout the quarters, we would rush to a board and find a red light flashing next to the number of the apartment whose servant was needed upstairs” (Adiga 130).
Balram realizes that discrimination between the rich and the poor is not only in the village but Delhi is no exception to this discrimination. Such inhuman treatment in the hands of the rich society renders the heart of a poor man and he asks the question
“Am I not a human being
too” (Adiga 148).
Thus, the picture Aravind Adiga paints of India in The White Tiger is of a nearly feudal society disguised as a democracy. If even a tenth of what Balram describes as normal operating business is actual, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, then India’s economic miracle is as much a lie as China’s.
The country might have gained its independence from the British at the end of the 1940s, but the majority of the people in India are still trapped in servitude. The White Tiger is a depiction of the social and economic inequalities of contemporary India. It is a penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the dissimilarities that persist despite India’s new prosperity.
Do you believe that balram's story is the archetype of all stories of Rags to riches?
Balram's story is the archetype of all stories of rags to riches.Because Balram shared his own story of entrepreneurial success, and he asked how big can you think? Balram was also one poor rickshaw driver's son and he also gives examples of rooster coop perpetual servitude, he believes that some wasn't any hard work for them. The rooster coop and God Hanuman are the things that he doesn't like whereas he wants to be like Buddha, imagine himself as Krishna.
There is a Balram richness that is not progress but it regresses because he is a morally corrupt man. He does not have any kind of morality. Person goes there because they want money . Balram How to reach where he is so that confessional mode telling the process because they done several wrong things.
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?
Deconstructive reading in this text we can see that Balram Halwai character that it is the autobiography of 'half baked Indian'. In this novel adiga was the present reality of India. And text itself gives hints to deconstruct the text and use of language itself to deconstruct the text.
He himself half baked but he himself tells it becomes very strong, loose stone in the narrative with perhaps Adiga has beautifully put inside. Adiga says I am not saying, but it is Balram's point of view. Balram is half baked Indian, that his single view perspective, is easily broken can easily be deconstructed however learned one can be. where he speaks about Adiga putting a kind of a loser stone in generation and he is there Indian ideas that critics should come from inside then it is better.
With reference to screening of the Netflix adaptation.
Write a review of film adoption of The White Tiger
“The White Tiger” follows protagonist Balram Halwai (Gourav, and played as a child by Harshit Mahawar), who narrates his life story as part of a letter written to the (now-former) Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India. Balram is an entrepreneur, he boasts, but he came from nothing: He grew up in the rural town Laxmangarh, where his grandmother dictated every move. Although Balram was a strong student, his grandmother pulled him out of school to work at the family tea shop, hammering chunks of coal. The only way out of that lower-caste life was up, so when Balram overhears that the village’s Godfather-style landlord, nicknamed the Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar), is looking for a second driver for his returned-from-America son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), Balram decides that person will be him.
The decision sets Balram on a path that he describes, in his narration, with a mangled combination of triumph and shame. When he’s hired and moves into the Stork’s family compound in Delhi, he’s overly deferential and thoroughly obedient, taking on more tasks and continuously belittling himself to secure the family’s approval. Balram cleans rugs, sleeps on the floor, rubs oil into the Stork’s calves, and argues that he deserves a fraction of the already-small salary they offer. Much of this inferiority is inbred, Balram says, the result of thousands of years of a rigid caste system
“men with big bellies and men with small bellies”
magnified by hundreds of millions of people fighting for the same low-paying jobs, amplified even further by the gap between India’s poor, both rural and urban, and the increasingly out-of-reach wealth horded by a few. coloring his interactions with the Stork and his family as we sense that something awful, some violence that no amount of money can fix, is coming.
Ashok and his wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) seem different from the rest of the family (Ashok broke caste custom to marry Pinky; Pinky asks Balram what he wants to do with his life), but how much of that compassion is meant to make themselves feel better? When they treat Balram like he’s from a different world, when they praise him for knowing the “real India,” when they take at face value his farcical stories about rural religious customs, aren’t they just as condescending as the rest of Ashok’s family? When they ask Balram to dress up like the stereotypical image of a British maharaja for Pinky’s birthday, aren’t they essentially mocking him for being willing to take their mockery?
Rao and Chopra Jonas work well together as individuals who occupy two spaces at once: They try to distance themselves from the familial wealth that protects them from the surrounding world, they ask Balram about himself and encourage him to set higher standards of behavior, they still consider themselves better. They are, like the Park family in “Parasite,” unable to understand how offensive their very existence is to someone like Balram, and how much worse their moments of kindness make that disparity. When Balram sees Ashok for the first time, Bahrani gives the moment a sort of romantic veneer: Ashok in slow motion, an upswell of music, Balram saying dreamily,
“This was the master for me.”
But scene by scene, “The White Tiger” punctures the fantasy that a rich man could also be a nice man, and although the comedy here is pitch-black, it strums with a particularly focused anger. Straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, all at the same time,” Balram says of the formula for success at the beginning of “The White Tiger,” Bahrani’s fish-eye lens giving us a warped sense of perspective. When Bahrani visually breaks the fourth wall again in the film’s final moments, evoking the grander themes of disruption he’s mined during the preceding two hours, the deliberate provocation he offers is as successfully acidic as the rest of “The White Tiger.”
Have you identified any difference in the novel and the adaptation? Does it make any significant difference in the overall tone and texture of the novel?
Though it's accurate to say the Netflix film stays true to the book, Ramin admitted to struggling to convey the full nature of the novel in a two-hour movie.
"That was very tough," Ramin told RadioTimes.com about cutting scenes he liked. "You’re trying to capture a tone, that was a constant thought in my head — what is the tone of the film? Because the novel was very fun: it’s very fast, it’s quirky, it’s funny, it’s satirical but then in the middle of the film, right dead set in the center of the book and in the film, something happens and from there moving forward, it shifts to something a little bit darker and weirder."
He concluded: "It [the novel] still has the humor but it’s darker and we constantly had our eye on that while writing the script and making the film." Producer Mukul Deora tells Good Housekeeping that "many" scenes from the book had to be cut, including one where Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) visits a blonde sex worker, which inspires Balram to save his money and visit with one as well.
The film and book differ slightly in structure. Perhaps one of the most notable differences between the book and film has to do with each work's timeline. In the opening scene of The White Tiger, viewers are instantly thrown into the chaos of Balram, Ashok, and Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas)'s car crash. But in the story, this event doesn't happen until much later on. What's more, Ramin made the decision to withhold certain key details about Balram that are given right away in the beginning of the novel until later on in the film.
“That [the cold open] happened in the second draft,” Ramin explained to RadioTimes.com.
“The first draft was even closer to the novel, where the character announces his definitive action — which I don’t want to give away as a spoiler — but the main thing he does, his tough decision, he announces in the novel at the beginning of the book."
He continued: "So by the second draft that changed and I started with that cold open, which is the middle of the film, and don’t reveal what Balram does until he actually does it." Executive producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas's character was explored much more in the film than the book. To add layers to Pinky Madam so she would be a more realistic and empathetic person, like giving her a backstory as a Doctor of Chiropractic who was keen to practice what she had learned, Even still, Priyanka recognized early on that the film was not about her character. "It is about Balram's character," she told India Today Television.
David Ehrlich in his review wrote this - Ramin Bahrani’s Netflix Thriller Is a Brutal Corrective to ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Why is it a 'corrective'? What was the error in Slumdog Millionaire that it was corrected? (Read here -https://www.indiewire.com/2021/01/the-white-tiger-review-netflix-1234607623/ )
The social message of “Slumdog Millionaire” — the Chennai-born author has often insisted that the British-produced Best Picture shined a spotlight on the poor of a country whose own popular cinema tends to ignore them. But his 2008 novel “The White Tiger” reads like such a damning critique of Danny Boyle’s slickly subaltern fairy tale that it almost feels like a direct rebuttal.
One is the star-crossed story of a passive kid from the Mumbai slums who gets the girl and lucks his way out of poverty after it turns out that his lifelong misfortunes were actually just preparing him to win the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” It’s shot with the percussive energy of a music video, scored by a worldwide mega-star.
The other turns a more skeptical eye towards the impact of globalization on the lower castes, as it follows the Machiavellian son of a rickshaw driver as he claws his way from Bihar to Bangalore in search of personal freedom through capitalism or from it, whichever comes first. It’s flecked with murderous black humor, told with all the subtlety of getting run over by a car, and generally sees Indian society as a giant rooster coop where servants either kill their masters or spend their entire lives waiting in line to get their heads chopped off.
Thank you…….
CITATIONS
Adiiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. HarperCollins Publishers India: New Delhi, 2008.
Arts correspondent Rebecca Jones talks to Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7666000/7666532.stm.
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