Upheavals In Adiga's 'The White Tiger And Last Man In Tower'

While the stories in Adiga's first major fictional exploration, Between the Assassinations, occupy a time frame in India prior to globalisation, his later fictional works, The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower, are both set in liberalised India of the nineties and beyond. Therefore, his fiction is shaped by the great economic upheavals that take place in India towards the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the New Millennium. The White Tiger, set in an India increasingly tending towards capitalism and global integration, has a protagonist who is the proud master of his own destiny. His latest novel, Last Man in Tower, set in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, during the recent real estate boom, is peopled by a bunch of

Nehru deserves a fair appraisal and cannot be blamed because Indian businessmen also wholeheartedly endorsed Nehru's ideas on central planning with their Bombay Plan (Das 76). Das also shares views similar to Mustafi about Nehru's economic policies which “represented the wisdom of his age”

The building was inaugurated by Krishna Menon, the Defence Minister of India, in 1959, on the birthday of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru who expressed his “fondest hope that Vishram Society should serve as an example of 'good housing for good Indian's'” (8). Weathering the elements for more than half a century, its facade has become “rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey,” but it continues to offer a venerable cosmopolitan life to its residents with Roman Catholics, Hindus and Muslims living together in universal brotherhood and harmony (8). Adiga muses that “the spirit of Prime Minister Nehru, if it were to hover over the building, might well declare itself satisfied,” even if the Vishram residents will readily point out that their Society is not at all a paradise for them (9). Without any self-deception, they will openly admit to