Aravind Adiga > Quotes

“See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
"Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I was looking for the key for years
But the door was always open”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“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.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“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.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Incidentally, sir, while we're on the topic of yoga - may I just say that an hour of deep breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the entrepreneur's day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools - that's my suggestion.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“If only a man could spit his past out so easily.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are.
"Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
"We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.
If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer!”
― Aravind Adiga

“...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“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.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I thought, What a miserable life he's had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job
as a driver—and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one than I will ever be.Part of
me wanted to get up and apologize to him right there and say, You go and be a driver in Delhi.
You never did anything to hurt me. Forgive me, brother.

I turned to the other side, farted, and went back to sleep.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder...'
The point of living? My heart pounded The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month? ”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent 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.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor - they never overlap, do they?

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?

Losing weight and looking like the poor.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“There was a fierce jam on the road to Gurgaon. Every five minutes the traffic would tremble - we'd move a foot - hope would rise - then the red lights would flash on the cars ahead of me, and we'd be stuck again. Eveyone honked. Every now and then, the various horns, each with its own pitch, blended into one continuous wail that sounded like a calf taken from its mother. Fumes filled the air. Wisps of blue exhaust glowed in front of every headlight; the exhaust grew so fat and thick it could not rise or escape, but spread horizontally, sluggish and glossy, making a kind of fog around us. Matches were continually being struck - the drivers of autorickshaws lit cigarettes, adding tobacco pollution to petrol pollution. ”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“But isn't it likely that everyone in this world...has killed someone or other on their way to the top?...All I wanted was a chance to be a man--and for that, one murder is enough.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“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. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.
"By telling you my life's story.
"See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:

TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!
or
BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!

"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday.
"I am tomorrow.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“In terms of formal education, I may somewhat lacking. I never finished school. I am a self-taught entrepreneur, that's the best kind there is, trust me”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“There is no end in India, Mr. Jiabao,as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You'll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain. The difference is everything.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again - from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this - that was the only way he could tolerate this cage”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“He shook his head, but I kept flattering him, telling him how fine his beard was, how fair his skin was (ha!), how it was obvious from his nose and forehead that he wasn't some pig herd who had converted, but a true-blue Muslim who had flown here on a magic carpet all the way from Mecca, and he grunted with satisfaction”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“إحدى الحقائق المتعلقة بالهند أنك تستطيع أخد كل شيء تقريبا تسمعه من رئيس الوزراء بشأن البلد، و تقلبه بالعكس تماما، و عند ذاك ستعرف حقيقة ذلك الشيء”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“أي مكان هذا الذي ينسى فيه الناس أن يسموا أبنائهم؟”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion.
These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh. I picked my way around broken glass, wire, and shattered tube lights. The stench of feces was replaced by the stronger stench of industrial sewage. The slum ended in an open sewer - a small river of black water went sluggishly past me, bubbles sparkling in it and little circles spreading on its surface. Two children were splashing about in the black water.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“In a socialistic economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“When it comes to work - hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment - delay, delay, delay. Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao,
that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with
a conscience?”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger