The White Tiger
From this Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel:
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep—all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.I wrote about the book here.
White Tiger can be remembered for the lucid language and the indirect compulsion to complete the book in one go. But the contents are anti-Indian. The author gets fame by defaming his country. Things like this can be written by any citizen about his country. This does not depict patriotism. It is like selling your own mother. Is it not shameful??
Comment by A.Ravi — December 29, 2008 @ 9:10 am