The White Tiger is all it's cracked up to be...

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger deserves the hype it's had...I resisted reading it for so long, and I wish I hadn't now.

It was one of those books that I didn't want to end because the protagonist, Balram, was so compelling - a character that you don't know whether to feel sympathy for as a victim of society or condemn as a murderer and a thief. The way the story of the servant-boy from a village in 'the darkness' who became a millionaire in India's technological capital of Bangalore is told as a 1001 Nights-like evening-by-evening narrative to the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is nothing short of genius too, if you ask me. The parallels between Balram and Scheherazade could definitely bear some analysis - the common girl who won the heart of a murderous king by stringing him along with magical stories night after night, and the murderous common boy who forces an international leader to listen to the story of his life night after night. Maybe I'll come back to it another time...

One of the blurbs on the book said something about how The White Tiger talks about a side of India that we rarely hear about - the underbelly. I beg to differ. People love to read about 'India's underbelly' - there's a whole market of 'poverty porn', for people that get off on the idea that they are seeing the 'real' version of any developing country from the comfort of home - Slumdog Millionaire, Shantaram, Bandit Queen to name but a few. We hear about 'India's underbelly' all the time - but not necessarily like this. The White Tiger doesn't glamourise or exoticise poverty and corruption, or horrify people by hammering them with disturbing image after disturbing image. I think Adiga attempts to explain the experience of poverty for one man - why it exists, why it thrives and the deep anger and pain it provokes in Balram, and the lengths he is pushed to by his background, and the servitude he was born into.

Aids Sutra: Untold Stores from India. Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth et al

I loved this book, but then it was always going to appeal to me - the list of contributing authors is a 'who's who' of Indian literature, including authors I love, like Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, & William Dalrymple, looking at different aspects of the Aids epidemic in India. Plus, all the proceeds from Aids Sutra go to the charity Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - satisfying my liberal sensibilities and some of my middle class guilt.



I did have some misgivings about reading a book that claimed to be giving readers a picture of the real, untold India - I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea that we can all buy this book, read it, and feel smug and self-satisfied for having done something 'good' and like we understand the reality of living with HIV/Aids in India. I'm not into so-called 'poverty porn' literature and the idea that reading is a path to somehow understanding or knowing another culture - it isn't.



The reason why I enjoyed reading Aids Sutra so much is that it manages something that a lot of poverty porn does not - it doesn't generalise or claim to tell the 'truth'. So many different stories and lives are presented that the reader could never come away thinking that they know all there is to know about the plight of people living with HIV/Aids in India. Because so many stories are told, in so many different voices, the only thing that you can be sure of by the end of the text is the plurality and the undiscerning brutality of the disease.