There are two kinds of people in India. Those who can afford English liqueur and those who can only drink the Indian kind. In this country, very similar to today’s world, there is an India of Light and an India of the Darkness, inhabited by only two castes, the caste of men with large bellies or that of men with small ones. It is in this country that Balram Halwai lives. Born to a very poor family in a village in the interior of the country, Balram tells the story of his life in the first person. He describes the extreme poverty of his village, where he is obliged to share a bed with all the male members of his family, the teachers who sleep and an interrupted education, as well as the superstition, arranged marriages, recommendations and humiliations. The death by tuberculosis of his father, who dreamt that his son should not be a servant like he had been. And then came the turning point when the rich and clever Mr. Ashok, who had just returned from America, employed him as a private driver in the city.

This is story filled with humour and surprises enlivening this first novel by the young Aravind Adiga, “The White Tiger”. With this book he recently won the prestigious Booker Prize (in the past also won by Salman Rushdie). A former correspondent for the American magazine ‘Time’, Adiga destroys the myth of Bangalore and a super-technological India launched towards the future. Or, at least, he shows its dark side, the sort that, as The Sunday Times wrote, will not please the Indian Tourist Board at all. In a comical and cynical tone, Balram portrays the poor who defecate outdoors in the slums of Delhi, the bribes behind all deals between the worlds of politics and business, the poverty and disease experienced by those who have not remotely experienced the positive effects of globalisation.

The anti-hero Balram’s caustic pen spares no one; not the rich (corrupt and cruel), not the poor (servants and cynics), the Muslims, or the false homage paid to Gandhi. The novel is based on the letters that Balram, who is wanted (but not excessively) by the police because of a murder case, writes to His Excellency Wen Jiabao, China’s Prime Minister. This expedient allows the author to address, more or less seriously, the great contemporary geopolitical debate on what Balram describes as the triumph of “yellow and brown humankind” over white people. In fact, in the back seat of the car driven by Balram, his boss Mr. Ashok, compares the American, Indian and Chinese political-economic models, and the contradictions with which he in turn leans towards the Chinese model and then the American one, reflecting the doubts of the Indian managerial class as well as India’s inability (“The largest democracy in the world”, according to pro-Indian Public Relations experts) to entirely follow America’s example.

Having recently returned from America, Mr. Ashok had hoped to impose that model in his own country, but the harsh reality of bribes, ignorance and greed lead him to change his mind, to make do and invoke the authoritarian Chinese model for India. The evolution experience by Mr. Ashok also inspires Balram’s evolution. From being a white tiger (“the rarest animal in the jungle”) he decides to transform himself into something else, well-aware that in India there are only two destinies, to eat or to be eaten. He will adapt to the environment, he will dirty his hands even more than others and thereby finally obtain society’s respect. A disquieting parable, that Adiga portrays in an amusing and pleasant manner, just as Mohsin Hamid did for Pakistan in the ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ (it is no coincidence that both these authors lived at length in the West and in fact, both these books can be seen as dialogues between the West and Asia. Adiga’s book was greatly enjoyed by Hamid, who described his colleague as “a talent one should watch closely”). It almost seems there is no hope for India. “Never before in the history of humankind have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao” writes Balram “ In this country, a handful of men have trained the remaining 99% of equally strong, clever and intelligent human beings, to live in a state of everlasting servitude.” The harsh novel by Adiga, could however help the West not to ignore that other India; the India with no computers, and very little to eat.