Reverse Swing

Review of "The White Tiger"

More than winning the Booker Prize, I believe, the main achievement of the book is that it has reintroduced and reignited the debate in the mainstream about the underprivileged India. The India which was drowned in the din of India Shining, the India which was successfully wished away by Ad&PR blitz, so convincingly that the "haves" class of Indians in metro now find the real India fictional.

True enough we have had major developmental landmarks in the past decade, in Information Technology to name one and the effect has trickeld down, fairly down. Even rickshaw pullers can be seen carrying mobile phones. But is that enough or is that the only thing required? A mobile set connects you to the wider world, but it doesn't disconnect you from the "Rooster Coop" to use Adiga's analogy. You are very much rooted there and have to live with its evils.

To borrow another analogy, this time from our national passion, the game of cricket : economic development in the past decade has gathered a swinging momentum which has propelled the middle class to hitherto unexperienced levels of prosperity. But what about the other side, the rougher one. It has got roughed up more and it is a matter of time when the reverse swing will come into play and shatter the stumps, catching the batsman unwares, the way the protagonists' employer was on the Ridge Road.

Having said that, the book itself isn't great by any yardstick, neither in the choice of content nor in the treatment of the subject. If at all it is too real for me to adequately term it as a work of top class fiction. Since I myself belong to the Darkness of the Gangetic Plain, I am acutely aware that the plot of the story is mundane, to the extent banal for the people living there. Not many would even raise an eyebrow if the story were to be narrated to them.

This to me captures the chasm, the divide between the two Indias, more clearly than anything else. One India would not find any literary merit in the work as it is a everyday tale for them. The second India has been seduced into percieving the whole of India as something entirely different and it is responding with shock and unbelievable awe...is this still happenning in India...we thought we left that with the 20th century....and heaping prizes on the book for being an eye opener.

For someone like me, who has escaped from the Darkness into the Light, all I can give is a Sphinx like smile, having seen both the sides of the coin, knowing fully well that the two classes of India have been flowing together for millenia, will continue to flow for more millenia but like the sides of the same river, from the source to the mouth, will never meet.