t's probably safe to say you can't go a week these days without reading at least one article talking about the economies of China or India. It seems there is someone in some business section of some newspaper always willing to write another breathless installment in the rise of the East as economic powers. The majority of the writers seem torn between their amazement that countries like India and China can actually have an economy, citing them as examples of how great the Free Market is.
What most of these articles fail to mention is the cost being paid for these great economic miracles. In China the majority of the labour being supplied to fuel the motor of the economy is as close to slave labour as you can get and still be paid for your work. People work long hours for little pay in conditions that would close plants in North America in a second. These are merely technicalities; nothing for us to worry about. It's not like we live there.
India has become the call centre to the world it seems. Whenever you phone a company for technical support these days, no matter what country you're calling from, you're likely to end up talking to someone in Mumbai or Bangalore. Call centres and a burgeoning IT class doesn't hide the inequities that still exist in Indian society or that huge numbers of people still live in poverty so abject that we wouldn't even begin to comprehend its depth.
The only place you're liable to read about the reality of life in India today is on the pages of one of the many books making their way out of India to the shelves of book stores in North America. Joining those ranks is the white tiger, written by first time novelist Aravind Adiga, and just recently released in North America. In his book, Adiga not only peels back the gloss of the economic miracle to expose the rot beneath, he instructs us in the means by which a small minority of the population are able to subjugate the majority.
A white tiger is the rarest creature in the jungle, only coming along once in every generation. When Balram Halwai was still able to attend the excuse for a school in his village, he was singled out by a school inspector as being the white tiger of his contemporaries for being able to read and write when nobody else could. The inspector promised that Balram would be given a scholarship to attend a proper school so he could fulfill his potential. Unfortunately, fate had other plans. His family were forced to pull him out of school to help pay off their debt to their landlord.
We learn Balram's life story courtesy of letters he has taken upon himself to write to the premier of China. He wrote these letters to educate the premier so that he wouldn't be fooled by any of the false pictures the politicians he meets might paint about life in India when he comes for his official state visit. Balram decides the best way for the premier to understand what life in India is like is by telling him the story of his, Balram's, life.
The first lesson Balram has for us is the reality of rural life in India. In his small village everybody is beholden to one of four landlords. If you want to grow anything you have to pay money to one person. If you want to graze animals you have to pay money to another. If you want to use the roads to make money as a rickshaw driver, you pay 10% of everything you earn to a third. Finally, the fourth one owns the waters. If you want to fish or use the water to transport goods, you pay him.
It's after Balram's family is forced to borrow money from one of the landlords to pay for a cousin's dowry that he has to leave school and start working in teahouses. Balram is destined for greater things, though, and his grandmother comes up with 600 rupees so he may learn to drive and get a job driving for a wealthy man. Through blind luck he happens to show up at his landlord's compound on the day the youngest son has returned from America and needs his own driver. This begins his long climb out of the darkness of poverty.
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