"White Tiger"

[fiefoe]

Aravind Adiga chose a very clever device to frame his story -- as letters to the Chinese premiere. The narrator is a social critic in the guise of a tour guide.

• And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.
• Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia. These are the only three nations I admire. 
• This is the only 150-square-foot space in Bangalore with its own chandelier!
• It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power... Which god's arse though?
• My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.
• Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: ... 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... these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. {Please refer to quote 2.}
• Like all good Bangalore stories, mine begins far away from Bangalore. I am in the Light now, but I was born and raised in Darkness.
• Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India-the black river.
• (For this land, India, has never been free. First the Muslims, then the British bossed us around.)
• Lotuses and lilies float all over the pond, the water sparkles like silver, and the water buffalo wades, chewing on the leaves of the lilies, and setting off ripples that spread in big V's from her snout.
• What traditional Indian village is complete without its blue-movie theater, sir?
• He'd been taken out of school too. That happened after my cousin-sister Meera's wedding. That had been a big affair too.
• To break the law of his land - to turn bad news into good news - is the entrepreneur's prerogative.