After an extended drought I have resumed reading, Masha Allah. I started with Aravind Adiga's Man Booker winner, White Tiger. Adiga's story is simple, perhaps not too striking or strange for those of us who have had a reasonable dose of Hindi movies.
The story is about a poor boy who flees his village somewhere in the Hindi speaking Northlands to become a driver in Dhanbad and migrates from there to Delhi. Eventually he kills his employer, steals his money to start a taxi business with the that ferries employees of call centres to work and back. The story is one long imaginary monologue between the visiting Premier of China and the main protagonist who starts with Mannu has his name and finally rechristens himself as Ashok Sharma that goes with his new status as an "entrepreneur". Along the way he retains the epithet that a visiting education official conferred on him, White Tiger, for the rare wit and intelligence that he impressed the visitor with. And in between all that, the story moves along like an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie, with some painstaking attention to detail that can be at times painful to an average reader. For example water buffaloes wallowing in a village water body is not exactly romantic anymore to Hindi movie-goers.
Which makes one wonder whether Adiga was following in the footsteps of Danny Boyle and his slumdog millionaire, showcasing indigent and indolent India to the sensitive West that is eager to the hear about the misery of Indians.
This is not intended to be a book review. I am a little too late in the day for that. In any case I am not competent or trained to review works of art. These are just random thoughts that crossed my mind as I read the book. For those who are looking for a proper review ,here is a slightly different one that I found interesting. http://zapreneur.com/the-white-tiger-and-the-rooster-coop/ekhassen/
So here is what I do not fancy about the book.
Clearly, the style of writing is different from typical, well crafted English prose. Adiga seems to think that an English novel does not have to conform to the canons of robust prose that people like Somerset Maugham dwell upon at length. Far from being elegant, the prose turns coarse at places. And Adiga's similes do not always come across as analogous to the situation he is trying to bring to life through them. Adiga is not alone in that. That seems to be a besetting problem with many a contemporary writer, including the much celebrated Chetan Bhagat of Five Point Someone fame.
Adiga could well argue that this is an Indian writing about an Indian story and the language has to reflect the milieu. But then some of the nuanced thoughts of the protagonist appear to be out of synch with his background, although Adiga would like to present him to us as one of those street smart, if not intelligent, rustic lads who would have been a smart man of the world, but for the unfair deal that life had dealt him.
Second, Adiga makes no direct case for the protagonist turning a murderer. In fact Adiga reveals a certain dark kink in the latter's persona, where he thinks nothing at all of betraying people around him, for his own surivival, as he does with a fellow driver in the household or neglecting his family back in the village, so that he may enjoy the fruits of his toil by buying himself such fineries of the city that his meagre salary would allow him to enjoy before he finally turns a full-fledged killer. Or for that matter when he buys his way into the fleet operation business by dislodging incumbent or he buys himself out of the hands of justice when one of the vehicles in his fleet kills an innocent youth. Mind you, the need for resorting to unfair means for sustenance is long past by then for the protagonist.
If Adiga has any intention of presenting the protagonist as a victim of the social or political system, I suspect he has not done a fool proof job. Mannu, alias White Tiger alias Ashok Sharma, has this strong streak in him to get ahead in life at all cost - costs to others account of course - that I believe that he would have led a life full of deceit, even if he had not been at the bottom end of the food chain in Laxmangarh.
Now, I have had a few conversations with a few people whose opinion and judgement I respect on the kind of character that Adiga has created. One of them said that the story "leaves no hope for morality". Another said that it "exoticises crime, violence and unethical behaviour". Personally, I do not share these views. I think morality is too much to expect of someone who has been at the poor end of the spectrum and who has been constantly exposed to how the only way to break out of that Continent of Circe like morass is to play the game by the same rules as the ones the successful play by: Deceit and Violence.
And here is what I like about Adiga's story.
It presents the crudity of life in Darkness which many of us can relate to. The last time I saw a version of this life, that was as unflattering as Adiga's presentation, was in the Devgan-Patekar starrer, Apharan, that left me deeply disturbed for many days.
The graphic detail of the bribing of politicians, the social exploitation of the less powerful by the more powerful in the political hinterlands of Darkness, the filthy inequity that coexists side by side with the ostentatious and venality of Delhi, the misery and squalor that thousands, if not less millions of under privileged immigrants have to go undergo so that the well heeled in Delhi may continue to lead their well heeled lives of opulence, where the market metaphor is bastardised in a strange and surreal way as unscrupulous contractors keep the flow of below market wage earning labourers from regions such as Darkness - all of these are tragically consistent with the accounts that reads of in the press and hears from personal accounts. I like to forget the three years that I spent in Delhi precisely because of this depressing hypocrisy that I saw among the people I worked with and in whose midst I lived.
If the labour market had well functioning instituions that ensured that all labourers earned enough to pay for their basic needs of food clothing, shelter, education for the family and healthcare, the middle and higher income brackets may perhaps abuse the formers' economic deprivation less and in the process learn to be a lot more self reliant rather than have their second driver wipe their jogging sweat off their faces. In laying out this surreal life Adiga raises hopes for a political future for my comrade friends.
The other aspect of Adiga's story that resonates with a worry that has been bothering me since the mid nineties is the annihilation, by the huge waves of immigration, of the genteel Bangalore that I came to as a student in the early eighties and lived and worked in the late eighties and early nineties.
Dont get me wrong. I have always chosen Bangalore over Chennai where there are many more of my ilk - Tam Brahms - because of the cosmolpolitan nature of the city. It is the Medina of the Tam Brahm. (Now that is a poor metaphor, indeed, but I shall stay with it a fortiori.)
The beauty of Bangalore pre-nineties was that all those who came to the city transformed themselves into Bangaloreans. They would all become just as genteel as the other Bangaloreans whose signature line is "Ootta aayitha?"(meaning, Have you had your meal?). Everyone turned into a Bangalorean, in other words. Whenever friends of mine have told me that Bangalore unlike Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai or Delhi does not have a personality, I have always disagreed. I have argued back that its personality is defined by its genteelness.
Somewhere in the mid nineties, I feel that changed, thanks to the "software boom". Many of the new wave of immigrants are like Ashok Sharma. Instead of melding into the social character of the city they bring the hall marks of the worlds they come from, turning the city a patchwork of bad behaviour from the worlds they come from. The genteelness of the past seems to have more or less completely given way to the world view and way of leading a life and doing business of the likes of Ashok Sharma. It shows up in the road rages in the city. It shows up in the poorly maintained neighbourhoods, even as the insides of their plush air-conditioned apartments remain well appointed thanks to the influx of below market wage earning, live-in domestic help and personal staff from their home towns.
A lot of the economy and the political levers, one hears from friends from the front lines of commerce,are now passing over to these new citizens. The genteel citizens of Bangalore are rarely to be seen in the "page three" style events that seem to define social life in the New Bangalore. It is another matter whether the Old Bangalorean would subscribe to that life style. While the traditional Banaglorean has always been a bit of a westerner, fond of his evening drink, his English play or movie or game of bridge in the afternoon, I doubt if he would ever have been comfortable in partner-swapping rave parties.
Society pays a price for these transitions. One reads of crime and social flare-ups that one would have rarely heard of some twenty five years back.
So every time a crazy SUV careened through bumper to bumper traffic to beat their deliverable deadlines I used to wonder and moved down some unsuspecting pedestrian or cyclist or two wheeler rider I used to curse the social cost of the outsourcing - globalisation economic duo. Adiga, with his profound insight, suggests to me that it is likely that there is an Ashok Sharma behind some of those unfortunate markers of the New Bangalore.
Nanni. Namaskaaram.
