In The white tiger, Aravind Adiga presents the act of a low-caste servant trying to escape from the situation of India's underclass, called the Rooster coop. Adigas’s character Balram Halwai writes a series of letters to the Chinese Premier, Mr. Wen Jiabao, proving Adiga’s point that although India pretends to be democratic country, there are many similarities with the repressive Chinese political system. Balram grew up in poor family in the village Laxmangarh in India. Despite his intelligence, he was forced to leave school and begin to work. As he moved away from the village life, eventually being hired as a driver for Mr. Ashok, he developed a severe jealousy against the upper classes, which eventually provoked him to murder Mr. Ashok. For Balram, the only way that he will be able to escape India’s ‘Rooster Coop’ and become a man is by robbery, bribery and even murder. “All I wanted was the chance to be a man--and for that, one murder was enough.” Initially, the robbery of Mr. Ashok was the first step toward breaking out of the Rooster coop. Balram in one letter listed various minor ways that drivers can bribe their employers (194). The techniques included: …show more content…
When Balram offered his driving services to the other companies in Delhi, he saw that they already had taxi companies. Knowing how the system worked in India, he decided to bribe the police to close other taxi services. As a result, he became a successful entrepreneur, with his company, the white tigers. After bribing the police, Balram realized that without becoming corrupted himself, he could not get ahead and become a “man”. Ultimately, Barlam remarks, “(…)(The) tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness.’ (p.189). The corruption is the end of Balram’s process of change from a village boy to a successful
Conformity, the act of changing to fit in. Conformity can completely change a person whether it be their looks, such as their the way they dress, or their personality, like the way they act around certain people. In The Sociology of Leopard Man Logan Feys argues that being human has a right to it, and that right is to be who you are. Society pushes out certain people for not fitting in with everyone else, but also says that nobody should fit in, because everyone has a different personality.
Themes are central to the plot of any story. In fact, themes are the purpose to an author writing anything. By definition, a theme is the subject or topic of a work. Some themes, like that in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are more obvious, while others, such as, “Hills Like White Elephants” are less clear and require readers to do some deep reading and critical thinking in order to identify the purpose of it, and through strong reading techniques, audiences will find valuable lessons embedded within the themes can enlighten and even revive our thinking.
In the novel The White Tiger, the protagonist Balram is a victim of the oppression of society. The oppression Balram suffers from leads him to sacrifice his values and relations. He is forced to follow the way of the society to survive. He is forced to obey his master’s command, even when unjust things happen to him, such as being scapegoated for a crime. The society also forces Balram to sacrifice his morality by stealing from his master and ultimately leading him to take his master’s life. He sacrifices his family by leaving them and living with his new master in order to make money.
As my role of becoming a justice based social worker and being exposed to new knowledge about oppression and privilege, I want to focus on the topic of race and White privilege to strengthen my knowledge and the knowledge of others on multidimensional levels. There are a few reasons why I have chosen an action plan focused on race and White privilege. I believe it to be a longstanding issue in our society, it is rarely discussed because of the uncomfortable territory that comes along with it, and more importantly, I would like to expand my awareness of how race affects individuals on different systemic levels and my awareness of my privileges can affect my role as a social worker. “Teaching about White privilege is fundamental to understanding
... world that Balram lives in is harsh and cruel, mainly because of the Rooster Coop. The Rooster Coop kept Balram from discovering his own potential in life, until finally he realized that he could leave the Coop. The fear and hatred the poor felt kept them in line, and kept others around them from becoming White Tigers. If the people of India were to realize that they were in a Rooster Coop, India’s slums would most likely disappear, and the poor of India would finally realize their true potential. The government would be forced to fulfill its promises and the rich would no longer rule India. Adiga has a lot of agility. Balram was a very dutiful servant. Balram repulsed the whore. He went through a period of florescence. This is an odd genre. Balram was their chaperon. Mrs. Pinky was quite in fashion. Balram uses a lot of sarcasm. In Mythology there are Centaurs.
If Balram is to have a time capsule, then in Balram’s time capsule would be three items: chandeliers, his driver’s uniform, and the idols and stickers of various Hindu gods. Balram would add chandeliers to his time capsule because it can be considered his obsessive collection. Not only does he uses it to light up his office, apartments, and even his toilet, and keeps lizards, his only Achilles Heel, at bay, but it also demonstrates his control and power. To him, chandeliers reminds him of the wealth, power, and the success he has accumulated for himself, and it is his ‘entrepreneurship’ that started his road to success, which also include hiding from the police for his attempted murder: “The police searched for me in darkness: but I hid myself in light”(Adiga 98). Indeed, he can contribute his success to his start up as an entrepreneur, as someone in the the light, symbolized by the chandeliers.
In these modern times, it is hard to learn by making mistakes. One needs something to help realize what has happened. An enlightenment, or even an epiphany, can help one realize a sense of reality. There are three stories considered here, but four characters discussed that have experienced such enlightenments: Balram from The White Tiger, MadMan from Diary of a MadMan, The Professional Writer from The Noodle Maker, and The Man who ran the Crematorium in “The Swooner” chapter of The Noodle Maker. Balram was a man who grew up in a poor area of India, and his fate was already decided for before he even had a chance to have a say in it.
“Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer, is a very noteworthy story of a young man, Christopher McCandless, who tragically ventures alone into the wilderness. It should be pointed out that the story is quite original and the main character is full of contradictions. At any rate, it is quite difficult to understand his real motives that influenced his decision to abandon the civilized world and head for the wilderness where he turned to be unable to survive. This is why it is very important to define the major factors that forced the main character to take the fatal decision.
I found the humor that Balram used in The White Tiger to be a Hidden Gem. The humor in the book is used to emphasize how much Balram relies on humor as a coping mechanism, both to cope with the effects of the immoral choices of the rich on him and with having to make immoral choices himself. I found this very unique and interesting because most books I read that are about a serious subject, don’t use humor. Also, the humor in The White Tiger also seems to make the story more digestible for me, except for some racist and sexist humor. It is hard to read social commentaries because they can be boring and expose many of the negative, immoral aspects of society. For me personally, he humor made the book easy to digest and more fun to read. When
(Adiga 103) Balram tells the reader on how easily Indian police can be a bribe. This is an example of corruption as police are being dishonest to the safety of others. It highlights the idea of Balram starting to become corrupt as Police are rotten. The quote demonstrates that corruption is very common in the place where Balram is living in.
Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger published in 2008, and a winner of Booker Prize examines the issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption, urbanization and poverty in India. The novel besides receiving critical acclaim was also lambasted by some in India for giving in to western prejudices and playing up to their image of a poverty stricken, slum governed country. Some even went to the extent of calling it a western conspiracy to deny the country’s economic progress. It seems ...
In the film, “Slumdog Millionaire” showed the world how India is a society that is filled with violence and abuse. Slumdog Millionaire exposes the tragic effects of poverty in many different cities of India. The film talks about a Mumbai boy, Jamal, who grew up in the slums that became a contestant on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” During the contest, Jamal were arrested under suspicion of cheating. Jamal was being interrogated by the police, and revealed events from his life history to explain why he knew the answers on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”
Even though discrimination against lower castes is illegal in India under its constitution, it does still happen. There is a wide abundance of bribing present in both governmental and non-governmental situations. For example, a person high on the caste system can bribe police officers with money to cover up murders, and rich people have privileges in shopping malls. Balram experiences his first signs of corruption at a young age, when the Great Socialist bribed all votes from the workers of his tea shop. He also becomes the victim of corruption after his master’s girlfriend kills a child in a car accident due to drunk driving. His own master then turns on him to blame him for the murder. After Balram moves to Bangalore, he bribes a police officer in order to help start his own taxi
This puts him back on the Path of Gandhi and he does not try to run away when the police come to arrest him. At the central jail Sriram asks for privy arrangements in the jail on the ground that he has not yet been tried and proved guilty in the court. But his request is denied to him. He is not regarded as Gandhi's man but as a dangerous person by the I.G and kept in company of forgers, murderers, housebreakers and pickpockets. They laugh at him because they don’t understand why he joined the extremists ‘because someone wanted him to do something, and not because such exploits as derailing a train brought him a share of profit. This was a fresh outlook that had not occurred to Sriram in his self- centered political existence” (WFM 193). He stays in jail till the country attains freedom; his fancy ideas of jailbreak in the beginning slowly give way to practical reality. When the political prisoners are released, his name is not in the list. The British have quit India. On the advice of the chief he submits a representation for his release. On coming out of the prison he meets Jagadish. A disillusioned Sriram looks at the album he has put together and thinks, “if only I had known that people would reduce it all to this. I didn’t go about inscribing “Quit” and overturning trains
Environmental degradation is nothing but an outcome of the dynamic interplay of socio-economic, institutional and technological activities. Environmental changes can be governed by many factors including economic growth, population growth, urbanization, agricultural intensification, mounting energy use and transportation. In the era of industrial revolution and sustainable development, poverty still resides as a problem at the root of several environmental problems. The basic intertwined liaison between environmental degradation, poverty, and violent conflict has been a prominent theme contained within the literature on sustainable development and conflict resolution since the mid-twentieth century. Although, some analysts have argued that violence has not been limited to the poor and deprived, but many have concluded from various studies that the devastation of the environment, poverty, and conflict are inextricably knotted. As a Journalist in Times of India, Adiga travelled a lot in different places in India and got unveiling realities with his novel. Therefore, he portrays these realities in the novel through the story of Balram’s, who belongs to a poor and low caste shudra, sufferings in this Materialist era and his journey for lightness from his native place Laxmangarh, situated in the darkness of Jharkhand (India), to the materialistic world of Delhi and Bangalore. He admits in the novel, “like all good stories; mine begins far away from Banglore. You see, I am in the light now, but I was born and raised in Darkness.” (p.14) Adiga portrays the real picture of India of light with the colour of bitterness, conflict, cunningness, corruption, murder and massive toxic traffic jams.