The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia. These are the only three nations I admire.

There’s just us and an ocean of darkness around us.

(no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you),

(Her death was so grand that I knew, all at once, that her life must have been miserable. My family was guilty about something.)

The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.

Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life – possessive, even.

how could two such contrasting specimens of humanity be produced by the same soil, sunlight, and water?

He was so powerless, so lost, my heart just had to melt.

How, every now and then, when master and driver find each other’s eyes in this mirror, it swings open like a door into a changing room, and the two of them have suddenly caught each other naked?)

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.

Tell me, Muslim uncle, can a man make himself vanish with poetry?’

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.

When I touched this spot, the pit of my father’s neck, I controlled him – I could make him stop breathing with the pressure of a finger.

The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read.

‘Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.’