The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

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 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. The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced.

One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.

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

When he caught his breath, he said, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine—at least one—should live like a man.”

To break the law of his land—to turn bad news into good news—is the entrepreneur’s prerogative.

They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.

Every evening I came home tired and close to tears, but Kishan said, “Keep trying. Someone will say yes in the end.”

To sum up—in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.

Free people don’t know the value of freedom, that’s the problem.

The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.

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 intelligent 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.

There is a sign in the National Zoo in New Delhi, near the cage with the white tiger, which says: Imagine yourself in the cage. When I saw that sign, I thought, I can do that—I can do that with no trouble at all.

Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love—or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs. Yes, that’s the sad truth, Mr. Premier. The coop is guarded from the inside.

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.

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, one 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.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.

Now, despite my amazing success story, I don’t want to lose contact with the places where I got my real education in life. The road and the pavement.