The White Tiger: by Aravind Adiga.

Once upon a time Dostoevsky wrote about a poor man murdering a rich one, and then the rest of the work was about his - the poor killer's - suffering due to his very alive conscience not letting him rest with his intellectual justification of the murder he had committed.

One of the best works of Alfred Hitchcock a few decades later in another part of the world, Rope, showed the dilemma from another angle, that of a theoretician about supremacy of some part of humanity recoiling in horror when his pupil commits a murder as a practical application of the teacher's theory. The teacher could not approve of this result and his mind working faster than ever found the serious flaw in the pupil's interpretation and explained why his act was severely wrong.

Both did this with little if any - none if memory serves right - reference to any religion or human authority, including law, whatsoever. Morals are universal in humanity.

Adiga, however attempts to avoid this question by putting forth facts of life of the murderer protagonist and almost pushing the reader to the conclusion that the poverty of multitudes of a particular nation - Adiga's own - and riches of the few are justification for this murder for profit, new identity, new life. This is left unsaid but again pushed silently forth as a populist agenda, a leftist ideal leading to revolution.

But fact is fascist and nazi regimes of the twentieth century began with lower class goons with no moral agenda and no theoretical support that could withstand any scrutiny of serious nature, paraded as leftist while shaking hands with rich that were coopted by blackmail and subsequently dealt with as fit for the moment, and on the whole had no agenda other than the regimes and their goons proliferating at expense of not only rich but all that was good, all the achievements of humanity through history. It was power of physical sort used by evil for no other possible goal than complete destruction of civilisation.

Adiga's work - this one, anyway; and if this one is any indication one would hate anyone to be punished with reading of another work of this author, no criminal except a child abuser would deserve it - is closer to fascist than to leftist regimes of yore, and is as far a cry from the gentle Dostoyevsky as Emily Bronte is from porn.
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While one cannot say there is no truth in the picture painted here so garishly, various incorrect details of fact and more make it obvious it was written with a readership other than home billion; that it got a Booker is no surprise any more than the Oscar that slum dog millionaire did, that merely makes the politics of the prizes obvious to all but willfully blind - after all Gandhi did not get a Nobel prize for peace (imagine the massacre if he had approved of finishing off the rulers, and the capability of people in this matter was proved amply during partition but only against one another, not the rulers - and it could have been channeled easily enough for all that towards the ruling few after all), and someone who converted under guise of help did.

It is about seeing a nation, a culture one does not comprehend and hates for its qualities galore, as something less and pulling it down by insisting they leave off being what they are and follow the line set by the prize giving who can withhold it from the superior and give it to trashing portrayals.

Adiga might have been less incorrect in the details if he had only stuck to his own background rather than imagining he knows all the billions in every corner. As it is he gives a clue to begin with in the name of the protagonist, translated very loosely from his own last name (- Adiga is cook in region Adiga is from, Halwai is sweetmaker in north, it is a bit like someone translating boulangerie to patisserie except no baking is involved in the adiga or halwai bit while the French words are all about baking), but he imagines India to be a uniform seamless society where regional differences can be overlooked by a writer aspiring for fame overseas - who cares if readers in India find faults, first they don't give a booker and second they usually fall in once he has achieved his fame and money with overseas base.

For example, he takes a now frighteningly common occurrence - a servant murdering a member of his master class - and gives it a hue of almost communist revolution (Tsar and family being murdered by starving proletariat!) what with the lurid descriptions of poverty of the murderer. But reality is very very different.

Murders in various large cities have occurred in middle class neighbourhoods (and middle class of India would not be so classified in west, economic levels being entirely different, but as poor) including upper and lower middle class, but victims are mostly either old couples living alone murdered by the servant in the know, or middle aged housewives who are kind enough to go fetch a glass of water for the known or stranger asking for it in the middle of the day. Sometimes there has been a rape of a younger woman dressed in western attire but the attire is irrelevant and the woman being alone, unlikely to be heard by neighbours, is more the point for the opportunist who subsequently kills his victim for his own safety.

In all this the victims are not - most assuredly Not - anywhere near the level of wealth described by Adiga for his victim, the younger son of a coal mining owners who buy politicians for their perpetuated ownership of the coal. That level of wealth is usually quite conscious re their need of protection from those that would rob them and in all likelihood attack them, and don't go about without bodyguards galore. With a multitude of servants kept in place at various degrees of hierarchy a unified attack on a master - and a male in his prime, at that - is as unlikely as someone walking into white house with a bazooka.

No, in reality most women or old people who do get murdered are not much richer than the killers. It is only that there is likely to be some money to be had from murdering people in their own homes by looting whatever is around, which is likely to be more in middle or lower middle class homes, since they are likely to keep their gold and silver at home. Westernised upper class is very unlikely to be profitable for attack in this way - if they keep such stuff at home they have guards, and those living as single males or hep couples away from extended families don't go about keeping gold and silver at home, or much cash. They spend on other things and use plastic like normal western middle class.

Another factor in his tale is about a murderer being one who ferries the employees of the new prosperity harbingers, the IT and call centre employees, especially women. Male employees are less likely to keep depending and more likely to get a motorbike or car for transport, while women still tend to save money and depend on being transported with other colleagues. At least one such woman has been murdered post rape by a substitute unauthorised driver, but the case is not clear - the driver who committed this murder was caught immediately and claimed he was paid by the murdered woman's husband who had been separated with her wanting a divorce and his family being dependent on the loan she had taken in her name.

Naturally the drivers of the city (Bangalore this time, although the other murders are equally divided between three prosperous cities of Bombay, Bangalore and New Delhi - Old Delhi being still quite old fashioned in many respects including neighbours being far too close to allow a murder to progress without danger to perpetrators) were quite upset since everyone looked askance at every driver for quite a while, and they in truth are a decent lot. As are most poor of India, no different from the lower middle or upper midddle class for that matter in any way except fortune, which is seen as a temporary condition rather than something that can be remedied only by murder a la French or Russian revolutions.

Another small incorrect detail is about anyone in north - anyone traditional, that is - allowing a mix of two actual professions, a driver entering the kitchen and touching anything would be taboo enough much less actually cooking for the masters and mistresses. Those that don't care about caste still care about someone who has been dealing with cleaning a car cooking for them. Cooks usually are expected to be cleaner than the household they cook for, whether employed or related to those they cook for.

In fact in proper traditional homes of north India (which term includes east, west and central India, since it is nomenclature invented in south India, a peninsular quarter, to counter the term South India that they identify with) a cook has a chalk boundary around the cooking area within the kitchen which not even the owner of the household may transgress without proper bath and clean clothes. Needless to say the cook begins the work only post bathing and fresh clothes, and with a cleaned kitchen, before the chalk boundary and subsequent cooking.

And employing more than one person is de rigeur unless it is a woman employed to generally serve with a variety of household work, but that again is amongst the distictly non traditional households. A driver in particular does not cook, period.

South is more, not less, stringent on this issue. I have seen old women starve rather than adjust to circumstances on a long trip if they do not approve of the food due to some irregularity in the person or whatever of the cook, and sustain on fruit through times until a proper approvable meal is possible, even though normally "adjust" is the requirement especially from all women of India, to most circumstances. If Adiga has simultaneously cooked and chauffeured both for some master, it would be a surprisingly lax sort of employees with neither old traditional nor new awareness re cleanliness about kitchen.

As for the accident, that is a real danger for any driver in India and especially one used to rules, regulations and clear roads of west. Most so called highways, no matter if they are one lane or divided six lane or more, no matter what region, are likely to trip any driver with a pedestrian of any age or gender whatsoever crossing the highway or even walking on it, as leisurely as if it were a stroll by a queen in her own private garden with no disturbances expected. Accidents do happen, and if the vehicle happens to be a car rather than a truck driven by a poor truck driver, hell breaks loose with villagers sitting on highway and stopping traffic for miles and hours until their ego is satisfied.

Accidents on highways happening in this manner are routinely blamed on "speeding" with no reference to rules being completely ignored by anyone including victims - for example, it is common to see a vehicle of any shape or size, bikes and trucks and auto rickshaw and oxcarts and pedestrians, not only traveling in the fast lane but coming at you opposite to traffic which is with you - they are saving a few precious drops and money, and if you object can inform you that the road does not after all "belong to your papa" and if you are not dead, what is your problem? And anyone who complains is treated as someone "who makes noise" - meaning, shut up and adjust.

One has to sympathise with Pinky who went back, and cheer her for doing so. Many who wish they could in reality cannot. Her relatives protecting her (- for a policeman might just take it into his head to book her and lock her up, and this is unspeakable horror for any poor male, not to mention a delicate female, in these parts of the world where a whim of the authority matter more than actual rules much less considerations -) is normal in every way, except the driver being made to take it upon himself (with his family back in his village in accordance, since they gain prestige and money as well) which is a total horror. It - such drivers taking (or having to take) the blame for money and more - probably does happen all too often (- one suspects in some famous cases, famous due to fame of a person involved), but likely the perpetrators of such accidents are drunken rich males rather than a woman whose only wish is to return back home west.

Adiga probably chose Pinky the young wife desperate to return to US for this master class involved in accidents, rather than a powerful male (usually single and "young") drunk in small hours, the usual one at wheels of such accidents, in his tale due to his need to avoid trouble with questions about who he meant. Although if only one reads a newspaper, accidents by drunken drivers - young, well employed, single, as often as poor truck drivers supporting large families, male in both cases - do happen so commonly one can safely say they are several every week in Bangalore alone. Deaths of the said drunken drivers is quite common too. One only has to drive a bit to see trucks upended on side of highways, and read the newspaper to find out about the well employed biking or car driving young males of middle class or well to do origins.

Adiga in short has used material from reality to paint a very pseudo version of reality where details are incorrect and hence the whole picture seems false, but that does not spoil the enjoyment of the tourist variety readership that is only too happy to see some more muck (a la slum dog and so forth) thrown on the land revered for spiritual knowledge in past and seen askance with surprise for a decade now for its prosperity based on technology and intelligence, rather than cheap labour a la other poor nations that have taken away manufacture of goods - try any department store in US and try to find a dress, shoes, bags, anything at all, that is not made in Asia, particularly in China (and the label that says "Malaysia" or whatever might just mean a trade off that amounts to the label as well as the object being in fact made in China), and you might find that the only possibility is to buy fresh food (fruits and so forth might be imported, but usually donuts are made locally).

Which explains the booker, the fame, the awed reverence from readership far removed from realities of India for this work and its author.
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The title - and its explanation thereof in the work, too, - is not without its questionable nature - which is being generous in allowing for doubts, rather than calling it outright incorrect politely or plain wrong for those that prefer a spade being called a spade. (I had some colleagues who prefer to call it a bloody axe in name of frankness, but that is another level of dialogue, one too like Adiga's work and not my way.)

Adiga may or may not have grown up in Bangalore, which does have a white tiger in the zoo brought all the way from Siberia, but it is nowhere near as impressive or frightening or angry as the Bengal tigers in cages in Delhi zoo - Delhi does have better enclosures, large and with trees, water, stone houses for the particular animals - but the outdoor tiger enclave is either not suitable for new males of the species or is crowded already, in any case the indoor facility with half a dozen cages or so is filled with a tiger alone in each pacing furiously, and obviously very very angry unlike the royal lions in their spacious outdoor enclosures, or the friendly (posing for camera) bears, or the silent cheetah whom one discovers right above one's head suddenly in their fully enclosed cages unlike the other species' vertical enclosures with opening to sky.

If there is a white tiger there now, it is less than famous. Even in Bangalore it is the officials that keep pointing at the white tiger, the viewers are merely taking it as yet another design of nature. Which is true across India about colours of eyes or hair in general - colours other than the normal dark do exist even without a mixed race, and are accepted as a variation, with no relation either way to beauty.

A boy from a rural area in northern poor parts of the country is as unlikely to be impressed by much less think of a white tiger as something special. This equation of pale tigers or colourful eyes and light hair with special or beauty belongs to the regions where they exist. Which is as it should be. Orientals prefer small nose, hair free males and almond eyes - others, especially those from European ancestry, are called "foreign devils" or "barbarians" by Chinese.
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Lurid descriptions of poverty are an effective weapon to shame the place, the land, the nation and culture that one is referring to, effective as long as the intended target can be shamed and won't hit back. Few are as convenient in this as India is - poverty in US is seen by those in power as proof of laziness of those that are poor even if the real fault is with various prejudices against the race or gender or non-wasp origin of the poor, poverty of various other nations is either ascribed to similar factors or to leftist regimes.

Truth is poverty exists everywhere including in most prosperous cities of US, and few nations of central Europe have been able to keep it in check but it is due to various reasons apart from the equable distribution of wealth. And poverty is never so dire in warm or rural places as it can be in cold urban ones - someone old, sleeping with a newspaper to cover oneself against cold of January on a bench out in the park in a northeastern city of US is far more pathetic than someone on a sidewalk in Bombay. This is also why one sees far more poverty in warmer lands than in colder - in former poor can survive and do so even out in open, in latter they have to find shelter and death from cold is far more likely, starving is far more dire.

So these shaming, embarrassing descriptions of poverty are a bit like attack on virtue of a woman - it works when the woman in fact has any virtue, honour, integrity, but not if she is without principle and manipulative and likely to deny it all.

That said, fact is when one is without something that people may have across the world on the other side as a matter of routine - or for that matter next door - that is not necessarily a cause for pain or unhappiness or feeling of deprivation, whether it is parents or wherewithal. Children take for granted whatever is around, and unless there is starvation or abuse of severe nature or something really unfair in dealings of adults with them, that which they are used to is how they see and expect normal life to be. A car and a bathtub is a necessity when one is used to it from birth but really is far from a need even for transport or bathing. Most Europeans manage fairly well with public transport and most in India bathe every day with no tubs.

This extends to other circumstances such as those described by Adiga in taking this shaming of India as far as possible in descriptions of urban squalor and especially of public open toilet practiced in urban slums. Which is not to say it is pleasant or desirable as a normal part of urban life. But it is only that these poor are people that have migrated from rural areas in search of work due to landless nature of their circumstances, and if they have land in rural areas they may continue there with no plumbing with no deprivation or filth. Disposal of waste or practices of toilet in rural areas according to old fashions worked for centuries and it is only a dismal picture when the two, westernised cities and rural traditional poor, come into contact and clash. One only has to see plastic waste on sides of roads in villages as one gets closer to towns, but then plastic islands in Pacific dumped by US and now grown to size of Texas are not exactly the way to go either. It is a problem of development, in fact.

One can experience very different interpretations of "normal" across the world even within developed nations, such as US and Germany and UK, so all the more it is understandable that a readership used to two car homes is shocked with Adiga's descriptions and sees murders as justified consequence. That there are poor far closer to their own homes is easily forgotten, as is the fact that murders for no reason are common in US (massacres in schools, an old husband shooting dead his equally old wife of well over half a century one fine day due to a small quarrel, freeway shootings in spring in LA, just some factual examples over some three decades) - it is forgotten that human is not that different across the planet and just or unjust is not that diverse. Yes, often people do get mugged in US for money, and while pickpockets proliferate in Paris and Mumbai alike mugging is less common.

The unique factor to India is common or similar instead with (what one reads about) mafia of Russian new free variety, those organised gangs that hire killers for little - the objective being looting the wealthy and murders to keep them in line. The two sets of gangs are separate of course, those from Russia operate presumable in US and France (again, from what one reads or sees on television) and those that operate in India being maneuvered as puppets from other lands far closer to the Mumbai wealth. And in neither of these is poverty a factor unless one counts the killers for hire and considers how little they earn in poorer lands. Those that order the killings and manage the extortion money are not poor, by any standards.

So Adiga has in fact created a fairy tale populated mostly with demons of various sort - fairy tale in the sense that his objective is to get a reader to pity the poor servant murdering the master, if not admire and sanction morally. This in fact is what nazis did with two pronged approach - mass killings post robbing (whether rich or poor they did get robbed of all before they were killed), and propaganda against them. And seemingly he succeeds, too - he did get a booker!

Really, is booker given by people with their minds closed? To facts, to principles, to history?

Do they not realise that this being lauded might just encourage poor Hispanics or indigenous populations to massacre the wasp masters of north, and Africans to do so to Europeans - and what is more, provide them with a semblance of justification as well, since a prize winning work cannot be seen as immoral or criminal but will of necessity be seen as providing justification for murder of all comparatively well to do by those that would exchange places by any means fair or foul? And just as past begins a nano second ago, that comma there is past already, so "comparatively well to do" is anyone with a shirt more than another, a child with one piece of candy more than the next.

If awarding this work is not seen as justifying such murders, is that indicative of morality of those that gave it, with might or physical power justifying it all, and one who takes it (land, money, Kohinoor, "Elgin" marbles, whatever) away from another being in no need of justification and the act of taking it away being its own justification, murder being the sanctioning of the surviving murderer by the act itself?

Perhaps - or how else can any colonialising, occupational power live with its existence?!!