"The White Tiger", an Indian entrepreneur

A few weeks back, I started reading “The White Tiger”. It is a novel written by Aravind Adiga, an Indian author and journalist. In 2008, “The White Tiger” won the “Man Booker Prize”, which is literary prize awarded for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

I have now read the first three chapters of the novel, and I have to say I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. The books that the teachers choose for us  is in my experience not that fun to read, but this time I actually enjoyed the book. I have read 117 pages, which is approximately 1/3 of the book, and I have finally started to understand the story and who the different characters are. At first it was a bit confusing with all the different names and places, but it is more understandable further into the novel. The main character is Balram Halawi, the white tiger. He was called a white tiger by a school inspector because he was a rare kind in his village Laxmangarh. Laxmangarh is a village in a part of India known as “the Darkness”, where the people are poor, and your destiny is determined by your caste.

Balram Halawi narrates his life in a letter to the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India shortly. He wants to tell the Prime Minister the true story about India, and to tell the story of how he went from just being the son of a rickshaw-puller to, according to himself, a successful entrepreneur. Through several letters, Balram tells how he got successful through his own efforts. He even revels that he had to kill his beloved master Mr. Ashok on his way to become an entrepreneur.  

In my opinion, the story was a bit slow in the beginning, but it is getting more and more exiting. He has not told why he killed Mr. Ashok, and the reveal of this is what I look forward to the most.

 

Picture: Link here