Balram is a bright boy who shines in his shadow-of-a-school (where there are no teachers and the funds allotted for basic equipment like desks and chairs and blackboards are swallowed by the authorities) a visiting inspector who identifies him as a ‘white tiger’, that rarest of rare beasts that comes along once in a lifetime in the commonplace jungle, promises him a scholarship but it comes to nought when Balram is pulled out of school and set to work in a tea shop to pay off the accumulated debts of his family. Balram’s father is an impoverished rickshaw puller in Laxmangarh, which is in the vice-like grip of the most avaricious landlords – what little the landlords leave for Balram’s father (and the others in the village) is immediately snatched away by the women of his household. The story of Balram Halwai is set in the area of darkness, specifically in the pitch black village of Laxmangarh in Gaya district of Bihar, a stone’s throw from the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha obtained enlightenment. And two destinies: eat – or get eaten up.’ And two places – Darkness and Light. Review of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, HarperCollins, 2008, pp 321, Price: Rs 395/-Īrvind Adiga’s 2008 Booker-winning novel, ‘The White Tiger’, is set in a very familiar milieu – the India that comes to us through the daily newspapers, that screams at us from the headlines every day, a country that ‘has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality’, which, further, is venal to the core, where ‘there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. Monkey-man - Interview with Sandhya Iyer of Sakaal Times, Pune.Interview with Suneetha Balakrishnan, Media Voice.Conversation with Shashi Deshpande - Beantown, Journal of the Bangalore Lit Fest.Invisible Cities: Ruminations along the Silk Route.Multicultural Fiction: Degrees of Disaffection.Review of Perumal Murugan’s “Poonachi or the Story of a Black Goat”.Review of “Gun Island”, by Amitav Ghosh.

The Story that Must Not be Told - Kavery Nambisan.Review of Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfar.My Family & Other Saints – Kirin Narayan.The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy.

The white tiger aravind