Thinking Activity: The White Tiger

 Hello friends!!

Here I share thinking activity on the white tiger. This activity given by Dr Dilip Barad sir. 

How far do you agree with the India represented in the novel The White Tiger?

Balram Halwai, the narrator of Aravind Adiga’s first novel, “The White Tiger,” is a modern Indian hero. In a country inebriated by its newfound economic prowess, he is a successful entrepreneur, a self-made man who has risen on the back of India’s much-vaunted technology industry. In a nation proudly shedding a history of poverty and underdevelopment, he represents, as he himself says, “tomorrow.”

Balram’s triumphal narrative, framed somewhat inexplicably as a letter to the visiting Chinese premier, unfurls over seven days and nights in Bangalore.It’s a rather more complicated story than Balram initially lets on. Before moving to Bangalore, he was a driver for the weak-willed son of a feudal landlord. One rainy day in Delhi, he crushed the skull of his employer and stole a bag containing a large amount of money, capital that financed his Bangalore taxi business. That business — ferrying technology workers to and from their jobs — depends, in turn, on keeping the police happy with the occasional bribe.

As a parable of the new India, then, Balram’s tale has a distinctly macabre twist. He is not (or not only) an entrepreneur but a roguish criminal with a remarkable capacity for self-justification. Likewise, the background against which he operates is not just a resurgent economy and nation but a landscape of corruption, inequality and poverty. In some of the book’s more convincing passages, Balram describes his family’s life in “the Darkness,” a region deep in the heartland marked by medieval hardship, where brutal landlords hold sway, children are pulled out of school into indentured servitude and elections are routinely bought and sold.

This grim world is far removed from the glossy images of Bollywood stars and technology entrepreneurs that have been displacing earlier (and equally clichéd) Indian stereotypes featuring yoga and spirituality. It is not a world that rich urban Indians like to see. Indeed, when Adiga’s book recently won the Man Booker Prize, some in India lambasted it as a Western conspiracy to deny the country’s economic progress. Yet Adiga isn’t impressed by such nationalistic fervor. In bare, unsentimental prose, he strips away the sheen of a self-congratulatory nation and reveals instead a country where the social compact is being stretched to the breaking point. There is much talk in this novel of revolution and insurrection: Balram even justifies his employer’s murder as an act of class warfare.

2. Do you believe that Balaram's story is the archetype of all stories of 'rags to riches'?

 We an see that the stories which portrays poor as central character at the end of the story Balaram becomes poor to the rich. We can see many people who are same as Balaram. Same like who belongs to poor and wide family, who did not complete their studies, who goes to work from early childhood, and who has bearing insults from those who are rich. These types of stories shows the struggle of poor to achieve their dream and for that becoming rich. The ways of reaching to the destination of wealth might differs of each stories but the suffering always remain same. So, this way we can say that Balaram's story is archetype of all stories of 'Rags to Riches'.

3. "Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique, deconstructive criticism aims to show that any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay' (Derrida, 1978, in Lodge, 1988, p. 108). Is it possible to do deconstructive reading of The White Tiger? How?

4. With reference to screening of the Netflix adaptation:

(i) write review of the film adaptation of The White Tiger

In this film adaptation, there are some changes. I try to write on Netflix movie. The White Tiger maintains the darkly satirical tone of the novel. Director Ramin Bahrani, who has also written the screenplay, mostly avoids the cliches of exotic India. 

He has a deft, light hand at the wheel, even while ruthlessly laying bare the many hypocrisies that make up modern India from the outright brutality of Ashok’s father (Mahesh Manjrekar) and brother (Vijay Maurya) to the well-meaning but ineffectual kindnesses of Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas).

For a film dealing with heavy-duty themes of corruption, caste, globalisation and entrepreneurship, The White Tiger is engaging and moves quickly. The cast and writing (“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love, or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?”) are excellent. Adarsh Gourav as Balram is a revelation in his first lead role—switching from canny to caring, hurt to anger and despair to optimism in a blink of an eye. Manjrekar brings all his slimy evil as the wicked patriarch and Swaroop Sampat is all velvet steel as the soft-spoken, foul-mouthed politician.

When Balram says, “Don’t for a second think there is a million-rupee game show you can win to get out,” you are reminded of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which seems to be The White Tiger’s spiritual sibling with its echoes of 70s Hindi films. A lovely looking, gripping, funny and heart-breaking film, we are drawn into Balram’s wildly colourful world from the get-go. And what a thrilling ride this heroic driver takes us on!

(ii) Have you identified any difference in the novel and the adaptation? Does it make any significant difference in the overall tone and texture of the novel?

When we try to compare movie and text that time lot many changes we find that because movie is very short and book is too long, that's why director make a change as par his or her convenient in movie but writer write his own way.

The movie begins with the scene of the statue of Gandhi and his followers at the night in Delhi when Balram is in Maharaja’s costumes. He sets back in the car and drunken Pinky madam drives the car, which leads to her striking and killing a small child. 

While the book begins with the letter of Balram Halwai to Wen Jiabao, who is going to visit the India next week to know the truth of Bangalore and wants to hear the success story of Indian entrepreneurs from their own lips.

“ You were looking for the key for years,

But the door was always open.”

These poetic lines bring major changes in both the movie and in the book. In movie, Pinky madam who speaks these lines when she goes to America and in books Bookseller who speaks these lines when Balram Halwai visits the book store and it changes entire life of Balram Halwai from Yokel to rich and successful entrepreneur.

Here some of the scene are change like in movie master planning game of tenis but in book there is badminton. And some of the missing part in movie.

So there is many differences in movie and book.

(iii) David Ehrlich in his review write this - Ramin Bahrani’s Netflix Thriller Is a Brutal Corrective to ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Why is it a 'corrective'? What was the error in Slumdog Millionaire that it is corrected?

Thank you...