My take on Adiga's "The White Tiger"

WORK-IN-PROGRESS. Plz bear with me. :)

Balram Halwai is writing a letter to the Chinese premier, who is coming to Bangalore to learn about business initiative in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (Atlantic Books £12.99, pp321). 'Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality - but it does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them.'

Balram is something of an entrepreneur himself, having enterprisingly murdered his master, absconded with a bag of banknotes and joined what he considers the New India - opportunities for all, so long as you're one of the few willing to break your way out of the 'rooster cage' of poverty and servitude. Betraying a master means the certain revenge slaughter of one's own family - and for all but a very few, this cost is rather too high.

The son of a rickshaw-puller from a village on the banks of the Ganges, Balram sees hope and possibility seeping into the black mud of the river and believes his salvation lies far away in the city. But taking a job as a driver for a rich family in Delhi is simply to be an indentured servant with a fancier title - he still washes his master's feet, blow-dries the Pomeranians and is expected to take the fall when the master's wife commits a crime.

Over the course of seven nights, Balram writes to the premier of his own genesis: from the darkness until the moment he decides to make light for himself. His voice is engaging - caustic and funny, describing the many injustices of modern Indian society with well-balanced humour and fury. But there's little new here - the blurbs claim it's redressing the misguided and romantic Western view of India - but I suspect there are few to whom India's corruption will come as a surprise. As social commentary, it's disappointing, although as a novel it's good fun.