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The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga

Discussion: Asia

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Asia

Mongolia, anyone?
By Andrea , Slow but steady · 5 posts · 14 views

last updated Mar 01, 2019 03:23PM

Tibet recommendations
By Andrea , Slow but steady · 5 posts · 15 views

last updated Aug 13, 2018 06:14AM

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What Members Thought

Jul 08, 2013 Shayantani rated it liked it

But seriously though, this book won the award previously awarded to Blind Assassin, Life of Pi, Midnight Children and other great novels? why!!!!

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Mar 17, 2011 Kate Z rated it really liked it

Shelves: best-i-read-in-2011

About a quarter of the way through this book ... did not expect to like it. Have been putting off reading it for 2 years now. Seemed like a book I *should* read, I just didn't want to. Then I was going on a long trip and I picked this up in audio form for the drive .... I am really enjoying it.

In the end I loved this book. To me this was one of those perfect books - it worked on a personal (small) scale and also the larger scale. He tackles social issues, politics, family, gender, sex ... it's ...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Beth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: around-the-world-group, 1001-books, 6-books-6-countries-6-continents, man-booker-prize, audiobooks

One night, Balram Halwai sits down to write a letter to the Chinese Premier who will soon be visiting India. He tells the Premier, who is coming to learn about Indian entrepreneurship, that he can give him insight into the REAL India, not the whitewashed details he will get from the government. He introduces himself as a poor man from "the Darkness," son of a rickshaw driver, who has broken out of "the rooster coop" of the servant class in India. He is a self-confessed murderer, he appreciates p One night, Balram Halwai sits down to write a letter to the Chinese Premier who will soon be visiting India. He tells the Premier, who is coming to learn about Indian entrepreneurship, that he can give him insight into the REAL India, not the whitewashed details he will get from the government. He introduces himself as a poor man from "the Darkness," son of a rickshaw driver, who has broken out of "the rooster coop" of the servant class in India. He is a self-confessed murderer, he appreciates poetry, and thinks quite a bit about issues like class, and economic development. He writes for seven nights, explaining his journey from his small village, to wealth in Bangalore, slowly revealing the details of his life and his escape from servanthood. A bright boy who is nicknamed White Tiger by a government official visiting his local school who notices his intelligence and interest in education, he is promised an academic future at a better school, but is unable to enroll because of expensive family weddings which must be paid off by all the children working in the local tea shop. Still, Balram continues to educate himself by eavesdropping whenever possible on the powerful whom he encounters in the tea shop and later positions. He is an ambitious boy, with limited concern for his family, and yet he is strangely likable. If you have ever visited India, the book will take you back to images of tragic class discrepancies which are so apparent in the country. Whether or not you have visited, you will be sobered by the portrayal of these class divides. This is a very contemporary novel, but the class relationships it portrays feel like something out of a much earlier era; although, they are probably more prevalent in many first world nations than we would care to believe.

The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and is one of the books featured in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The reviewer there points out the difference between the mystical, romanticized India of Salman Rushdie's work and the grim reality presented in this novel. He finishes his review with the statement "This is a very angry book that manages, remarkably, to be very funny indeed." I completely agree and heartily recommend it. I listened to the audio version of the book, which was excellent. ...more

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Sep 06, 2011 Sutapa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Nicely depicted the thinking of a poor boy not like the others in his surrounding. But the dramatic change and his change of life afterward ...... a bit unbelievable!!

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