Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga (b. 1974) was born in India and raised partly in Australia. He attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai.

Aravind Adiga stormed to the limelight by winning the prestigious Booker prize in 2008 for The White Tiger.

Works

• The White Tiger {2008}

The White Tiger

The White Tiger is the story of the narrator Balram Halwai, a “self-taught entrepreneur”, the story of whose upbringing is “the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced”. Bullied, uneducated and underprivileged, Halwai comes from the vast rural hinterland in which 70 per cent of the nation’s population still lives, often in shocking deprivation (the land of “the Darkness”). But Halwai has his armoury. He is gritty, cunning and resourceful, driven by a consuming ambition to escape to New India, into the bright lights of the big city in which all he is denied exists.

The novel explores with wit and insight the realities of these two Indias—the shining and the dark—and reveals what happens when the inhabitants of one collude and then collide with those of the other.

Source: Soumya Bhattacharya in The Independent