India - China: Relations And Developments-2

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2009, 07:01 PM by Husky.)

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http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/03/rea...from-china.html
QUOTESunday, March 08, 2009
the real White Tiger - from China
this is what Marigold Idiots Karat and Yechury (not to mention their scribe at the Chindu) do not want you to know about China. I really loved this piece in Pico Iyer's review

The twisted logic of the system decrees that each personâs well-being depends on the suffering of someone else: survival essentially means self-protection, and protecting yourself means putting your neighbor down.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/books/re....html?ref=books

Every Indian should buy this book and read it aloud to that White Tiger guy whose character writes the book to the Chinese premier.
Is he referring to White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (I think it won a booker?).

Doesn't this AA - writing about a very poor person as if he knows what it's like, without having ever been poor and who then won a booker for it - remind you of someone? (Hint hint: Danny Boyle - who never went to India and didn't know about it but decided to make slummovie and who won a bunch of oscars for it.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct...oker-prize
QUOTERoars of anger

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker prize this week. But its unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland. He tells Stuart Jeffries why he wants to expose the country's dark side

Aravid Adiga: 'This is the reality for a lot of Indian people'

This year's Booker prize winner, Aravind Adiga, talks to Stuart Jeffries

How do you get the nerve, I ask Aravind Adiga, to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor? After all, you're an enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxford-educated ex-Time magazine correspondent? How would you understand what your central character, the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller turned amoral entrepreneur and killer, is going through?

It's the morning after Adiga, 33, won the Â£50,000 Man Booker award with his debut novel The White Tiger, which reportedly blew the socks off Michael Portillo, the chair of judges, and, more importantly, is already causing offence in Adiga's homeland for its defiantly unglamorous portrait of India's economic miracle. For a western reader, too, Adiga's novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight's Children (a book that Adiga recognises as a powerful influence on his work), seem positively twee. The Indian tourist board must be livid.

Adiga, sipping tea in a central London boardroom, is upset by my question. Or as affronted as a man who has been exhausted by the demands of the unexpected win and the subsequent media hoopla can be. Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: "I don't think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me." On a shortlist that included several books written by people very much like their central characters (Philip Hensher, for example, writing about South Yorkshire suburbanites during the miners' strike, or Linda Grant writing about a London writer exploring her Jewish heritage), the desire not to navel-gaze is surprising, even refreshing.
(Now that lame response is what's really Tweee.)

But isn't there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventriloquising others' suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfil his literary ambitions? "Well, this is the reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. In somewhere like Bihar there will be no doctors in the hospital. In northern India politics is so corrupt that it makes a mockery of democracy. This is a country where the poor fear tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 Indians a day, but people like me - middle-class people with access to health services that are probably better than England's - don't fear it at all. It's an unglamorous disease, like so much of the things that the poor of India endure.
(Oh the uppity christoconditioned - with his Oxford credentials - speaks up for the trodden-upon Indian masses. What a Robin Hood. I'm touched.)

"At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society. That's what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That's what I'm trying to do - it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination."
("Look at me. I'm like, like Flaubert et Dickens! Wooohooo. Look at my h-booker prize.")

That, though, makes Adiga's novel sound like funless didacticism. Thankfully - for all its failings (comparisons with the accomplished sentences of Sebastian Barry's shortlisted The Secret Scripture could only be unfavourable) - The White Tiger is nothing like that. Instead, it has an engaging, gobby, megalomaniac, boss-killer of a narrator who reflects on his extraordinary rise from village teashop waiter to success as an entrepreneur in the alienated, post-industrial, call-centre hub of Bangalore.
(Sounds like the slummovie)

Balram Halwai narrates his story through letters he writes, but doesn't send, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Wen is poised to visit India to learn why it is so good at producing entrepreneurs, so Balram presumes to tell him how to win power and influence people in the modern India. Balram's story, though, is a tale of bribery, corruption, skulduggery, toxic traffic jams, theft and murder. Whether communist China can import this business model is questionable. In any event, Balram tells his reader that the yellow and the brown men will take over the world from the white man, who has become (and this is where Balram's analysis gets shaky) effete through toleration of homosexuality, too slim and physically weakened by overexposure to mobile phones.

Halwai has come from what Adiga calls the Darkness - the heart of rural India - and manages to escape his family and poverty by becoming chauffeur to a landlord from his village, who goes to Delhi to bribe government officials. Why did he make Halwai a chauffeur? "Because of the whole active-passive thing. The chauffeur is the servant but he is, at least while he's driving, in charge, so the whole relationship is subverted." Disappointingly, Adiga only knows of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic from reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. But that dialectic is the spine of his novel: the servant kills his master to achieve his freedom.
(All christoconditioned Indians are clones of each other. Nothing original in them. Hindus may not get a booker or a putrid feva- uhh, I mean a pullitzer - or a nobel piecemeal award, but at least we don't parrot other people and then think we're originals.)

The White Tiger teems with indignities masquerading as employee duties. Such, Adiga maintains, is India - even as Delhi rises like a more eastern Dubai, call-centres suck young people from villages and India experiences the pangs of urbanisation that racked the west two centuries ago. "Friends who came to India would always say to me it was a surprise that there was so little crime and that made me wonder why." Balram supplies an answer: servitude. "A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9% - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude." What Balram calls the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy; unlike China, he reflects, India doesn't need a dictatorship or secret police to keep its people grimly achieving economic goals.
(Ah yes. Why didn't I see that coming. This is the very lefty Guardian, after all. Adiga now foresees/plans for the Revolution of the ... the People? No. The Proletariat? No. The 'Servants'. <img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /> Apparently 99.9 percent of India is in servitude - it must be so, since a hookerprize winner says so!)

"If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them," says Adiga. "That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like." Adiga conceived the novel when he was travelling in India and writing for Time magazine. "I spent a lot of time hanging around stations and talking to rickshaw pullers." What struck him was the physical difference between the poor and the rich: "In India, it's the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs. But also their intelligence impressed me. What rickshaw pullers, especially, reminded me of was black Americans, in the sense that they are witty, acerbic, verbally skilled and utterly without illusions about their rulers."
(Now now. Adiga doesn't see other people. That's 'cause Adiga is a christoconditioned loser. I know urban Hindus who pay for the schooling of workmen's kids and give them free music classes. In other words, people who take a sincere interest in fellow people they know. It's the Hindu way, to help others rise with you.)

It is not surprising then that the greatest literary influences on the book were three great African-American 20th-century novelists - Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. "They all wrote about race and class, while later black writers focus on just class. Ellison's Invisible Man was extremely important to me. That book was disliked by white and blacks. My book too will cause widespread offence. Balram is my invisible man, made visible. This white tiger will break out of his cage."
(Of course. Like slummovie's Danny Boyle, this Adiga knows all about every other population/their books and thoughts - Dickens, Nietsche, African-American writers - and nothing about Indians/Hindus, the actual subjects of his fictions. He just has *notions* about Indian society and what he imagines makes it tick. Then he reasons to himself that that must be how it factually ticks - the 'reality'. And hence he wins a hooker prize for having presented the very conclusions christowest has been working hard to get the Native Indians to echo.)

For Indian readers, one of the most upsetting parts of that break-out is that Halwai casts off his family. "This is a shameful and dislocating thing for an Indian to do," says Adiga. "In India, there has never been strong central political control, which is probably why the family is still so important. If you're rude to your mother in India, it's a crime as bad as stealing would be here. But the family ties get broken or at least stretched when anonymous, un-Indian cities like Bangalore draw people from the villages. These really are the new tensions of India, but Indians don't think about them. The middle- classes, especially, think of themselves still as victims of colonial rule. But there is no point any more in someone like me thinking of myself as a victim of you [Adiga has cast me, not for the first time, as a colonial oppressor]. India and China are too powerful to be controlled by the west any more.
(But Adiga *is* controlled. Forever controlled. He's exactly what the christian African-Americans are: christian or christian-conditioned, yet not to be reconciled with their western christian puppeteers/instructors/initiators into christian patterned thinking. Forever enslaved because it is ideas that are still enslaving them, no longer the people who instilled those ideas.
Notice this is not the case with Natural Traditionalists in any continent. However, these have to bear the brunt of the native traitor's outwardly-directed self-loathing.)

"We've got to get beyond that as Indians and take responsibility for what is holding us back." What is holding India back? "The corruption, lack of health services for the poor and the presumption that the family is always the repository of good."

Our time is nearly over. Adiga doesn't know how he will spend his prize money, isn't even sure if there's a safe bank in which to deposit it. Doesn't he fear attacks at home for his portrayal of India? After all, the greatest living Indian painter, MF Husain, lives in exile. "I'm in a different position from Husain. Fortunately, the political class doesn't read. He lives in exile because his messages got through, but mine probably won't."

Adiga, who says he has written his second novel but won't talk about it ("It might be complete crap, so there's no point"), flies home to Mumbai today to resume his bachelor life. His most pressing problem is that Mumbai landlords don't let flats to single men. Why? "They think we're more likely to be terrorists. I'd just like to say, through your pages, that I am not. In fact, if you check the biographies of Indian terrorists you'll find they are mostly family men who are well-off. It's a trend that needs to be investigated."
Link to this audio

Possibly in a new novel by Adiga, yet again analysing the unbearably poignant torments of the emerging new India. Ideally, though, with jokes.

Â· This article was amended on Saturday October 18 2008. We were wrong to originally describe author Philip Hensher as Sheffield-born; he was born and lives in London. This has been corrected.

Always interesting, the sort of ideas christendom keeps rewarding with awards:
1. Anti-India
2. projections of universal poverty that in their presentation almost rival the very real effect that the christians from Britain produced on the Hindus (under the christoheel 'empire').
3. projections of extreme and even unreal casteism,
4. projections of ultra-violence by 'Heendoos'
5. India=casteism, Hinduism=casteism
6. India is where 99.9% is oppressed by 0.1%. Let me guess, is this a modern-day secular version of the christian Japhetic-Hamitic theory, or the communistic feudal theory ("aristocracy is bad", then "bourgeosie is bad", then ...)? Oh wait, both theories are the same: stemming from christo thought.
7. Not just communities (dubbed 'caste'), but Indian family structure is recognised as the most powerful part of the societal components of Hindu Dharma. Therefore it must be destroyed. Hence, White Tiger Pub Bharo.

After hearing whispers and grand-standing and all kinds of glory-mongering, I was anticipating some external expression in Indians of the sort of humongous genetic quotient/intelligence quotient values (I'm talking of worship-worthy magnitudes) that have been rumoured/bandied/boasted about. Sadly, there was never a sighting. But I can obviously stop expecting now: these magnifico GQs - or IQs, zoals 't je belieft - simply *must* belong to the christo Suzanna Roys, christo-conditioned Rawalpind A-dig-s and the communistical Amitaaf Ghosts and other christo-patterned entities, since they all managed to hook-a-booker prize or some other grand award (like a nobel).

Oooohhh, would ya look at that: "hook-a-booker". A bit like hooga-booga! I made that up. Quick! I deserve a Booker-Nobel for Literature.
Huh. What do they mean they don't hand them out to just anyone? *Every* Tom, Dick and Harry is getting one. What? One needs to produce "Native Regurgia of western perceptions on India and Hindu society"? Hmmm. Makes sense. It would not be called 'hooker prize' for nothing...
Never mind then. I'll get an IF award for most talentless, nonsensical and almost-tasteless (if only one could pin-point for sure that it means what it seems to insinuate that it means) phrase ever seen so far. I thank everyone and everything that made it possible - most particularly those who inspired the phrase.

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