The White Tiger - A book review

I have always held a perception that the books that win literary awards are probably the boring ones which are only understood by a select pretentious few who like to portray themselves as guardians of literature. It is with the same skepticism that i began to read Aravind Adiga's book, The White Tiger which recently won the Man Booker prize for fiction and to my pleasant surprise, discovered a masterpiece. It is indeed a hard-hitting work sketched on a canvas filled with a liberal dosage of dark humour and sattire. The narration is rather unique as a series of letters to a fictional chinese premier. The darkness that the protagonist battles in his quest to break the shackles of a complex India - which is a seeming potboiler of contradictions and imbalances, has been narrated in a rather humourous and novel way. The Rooster coop - is arguably the most creative way to describe the average Indian mentality - one of the biggest contradictions of the 21st century - a land where the people laugh at the west for lack of culture but find it extremely difficult to maintain even basic cleanliness; a culture where collective good is conveniently sacrificed at the altar of individual prosperity; a nation struggling to bridge the widening gap between the haves and have nots; The transformation of Balram Halwai from a munna(caught in the shackles of a low-trodden north indian family) to an enterprising entrepreneur is to a large extent, a reasonable depiction of India's struggles to come to grips with these contradictions amidst the significant economic developments of the last couple of decades. I have not read any other books which have won a booker but if any of them have characters like Balram, they are definitely going to occupy front places on my book shelf. The White Tiger is worth a read and its stripes are definitely endearing. Of course, i will definitely be keeping an eye on my chauffeur