I recently had occasion to visit India for the first time to speak at a conference put on by the media conglomerate India Today. Sadly my visit was very short, just a toe-touch. Still, it was fascinating from start to finish. On the way over, one of the flight attendants told me she was using her down time in New Delhi to have a complete-body medical examination at Max Healthcare for about $350. Medical tourism in action. The final event of the conclave was a raucous Q&A between former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and an audience of Indian elites who weren’t buying his assertions that Pakistan has the potential to be a good neighbor.
My experience was heightened considerably by the book I was reading at the time, The White Tiger, by the young journalist Aravind Adiga. It is one of the most thrilling novels I’ve ever read: pungent, evocative, brutally depressing, outrageously funny.
Aravind AdigaIt is a novel of class and caste, told from the lower ranks, in which misery and aspiration battle for supremacy. Along the way, you learn a great deal about modern India. I’ve also been reading two good non-fiction books about India: Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta, and Imagining India, by Nandan Nilekani. I would recommend both of them; but The White Tiger is an absolute must-read.
The book is a best-seller and has won awards including the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Writing for the Telegraph, Amrit Dhillon called it a “new departure in India by [its portrayal of] the emotions, sorrows, and aspirations of the hitherto invisible poor.” This portrayal has, not surprisingly, caused an uproar among Indians — as, more recently, Slumdog Millionaire did.
Adiga was born in Madras (now Chennai), and studied at Columbia and Oxford. He was a South Asia correspondent for TIME and has also been published in the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. His second novel, Between the Assassinations, will be published in June.
Adiga has agreed to take questions from Freakonomics readers about The White Tiger, Indian society … or even Bollywood ad campaigns and autorickshaw pricing. So post your questions in the comments section below. As with past Q&A’s, we will post his answers here in a few days.
Addendum: Adiga answers your questions here.
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Is India a bully? Why does it not have good relations with any neighbor including Nepal, a Hindu country? How long can it hide in the pages of history and not recognize the reality of its geography?
Do you think it’s possible that Indians will one day have the political will to eradicate poverty, or do you think Indian politicians and non-poor people consider poverty endemic — the poor you will have with you always?
Is India a bully? Why does it not have good relations with any neighbor including Nepal, a Hindu country? How long can it hide in the pages of history and not recognize the reality of its geography?
- Mohamed
In response:
India’s relations with the government of Nepal may not be the best because of their brutal Maoist nature and also because Nepal has allowed Islamic terrorists to use its territory to plan attacks on India. The Bihar and UP border with Nepal is rife with fundamentalist ideology. On the other hand, people from India and Nepal are on the most cordial terms possible. By the way, India does not support LTTE, a Hindu Tamil group in Sri Lanka fighting for its independence, despite the large Indian Tamil population. India is responsible for liberating Bangladesh. Do you know why it was necessary? Because the light-skinned West Pakistanis-descended from Pathans and Jats, did not consider the Bengali speaking dark-skinned Bangladeshi Muslims worthy enough to be Muslims. Read some history and get your facts right before you make a comment!
Why does India fail to fully embrace the impressive body of its ancient Vedic knowledge? Recent research at universities such as Ohio State has proven that at least some of this has great utility to modern medicine in cancer treatment and prevention as well as antiaging efforts, and that Sanskrit has much in common with German.
When ancients described the properties of the Vedic “gods” they were actually describing the fundamental forces of nature as per quantum physics. (If you think this preposterous, read the descriptions of Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu and Brahman AKA unified field to a physicist.) How did they know this?
Ancient Vedic philosophers anticipated much of the philosophy and mathematics credited to the Greeks, and there are designs for cities and machines in these documents. Isn’t study of the Vedas worthy of a national research project, or perhaps a whole university?
Mr. Mohamed, India is not a bully. You are a bully.
An 8% annual growth of the Indian economy is thought necessary to have a significant effect on reducing India’s poor. The world wide recession has decreased growth from 9-10% down to 5-6%. Do you think that India needs to expand domestic consumption and remain a relatively closed economy to try to increase growth or continue to try to expand multilateral trade to increase growth over the next 5-10 years?
Mr. Adiga,
Your book is an absolute revelation after reading sops like Shashi Taroor. The Indian dispora’s venom toward your book got me curious. Your story telling skill is matchless and your honesty is humbling. To many Indians the poor is simply a part of that that is distateful and, ultimately, invisible about their environment. Your insightful book revealed so much to me during my own trips to India. Being of Indian origin I was somewhat dimly aware of what you write without the reality brought to the front of my being with full force. Bravo. Keep writing.
The last time when I was India, I heard that half of the politicians should be in jail. How come Indians tolerate these old people with old ideas to rule such a large democracy.
India needs to get credit for the economic growth, however most of the poor are still poor and lately according to NYT, children are starving to put it midly. Should India spends it resources on space technology rather than uplifting the average Joe on the street?