Thinking Activity - The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga

                            The white Tiger by Arvind Adiga 

This blog is part of the thinking activity given by Prof. Dilip Barad . Click Here.

The white Tiger is novel written by Indian author in 2008 and won the 40th Man Booker prize in the 2008. In the novel Balram is the protagonist of the novel and he him self tells a story of his financial career that how he became one rickshaw driver to entrepreneur. He tells all the things by writing series of letters but never send to Wen Jiabao , the Chinese premier, Who has come to Bangalore on an official assignment.

( 1 ) How far do you agree with the India represented in the novel The White Tiger ?

Ans. In the novel Balram him self said that he is Half baked Indian, so through this we can see that Adiga portrays various realistic and graphic picture of some of the most drastic and bitter facts of India. But he well said that the narrator is half baked Indian so we can’t believe hundred present on it. As per M.Q. Khan said it is about Adiga’s India but it is not everybody’s India. He does not bring out the whole of India. Because on the other side some good soul , good persons, truth and honesty are there. But in novel he criticize various aspects of Indian society like Education, Indian traditional marriage, politics, Religion, Land lords, corruption and culture etc.

( 2 ) Do you believe that Balram’s story is the archetype of all stories of ‘rags to riches’?

Ans. Yes, Balram’s story is become the archetype of all stories but We can say only 30 to 40 percent people can follow same thing like Balram did specially in the era of Post truth. People can take as new morality like Balram said. But other can also become a good and well known person in society through the hard work, think out of box, intelligence and some time may be luck. For ex – In slumdog millionaire movie Jamal became rich. Because people of India wants to become reach any way and that’s why they used lottery tickets or this kind of shows also. 

( 3 ) "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?

Ans. Yes, this text can be deconstructed well. Here is one So here we can say that Balram himself say that he is half baked Indian and author him self said at starting point that – “ This book is Auto – Biography of half – baked Indians”, so how we can believe on his all criticism of dark India. Because he knows only through his own experience. So it’s very narrow views not wider one.

“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.”

( 4 ) Is it possible to read The White Tiger in context of the Globalization?

Ans. Yes, Aravind Adiga’s novel foregrounds an India that is undergoing the process of globalization, and is subjected to its opposite pulls of prosperity and poverty. Adiga him self the child of the age of globalization. He see globalization as harmful , bringing about increased domination and control by the wealthy over the poor, thus increasing the hegemony of the “ haves” over the “haves – nots”. In the article “ An Insight into the Facets of a Globalized India” by Rano Ringo talked well that how globalized affects well in various fields like education, Religion , corruption etc.

                                                                              Thanks.