Aravind Adiga (born 23 October 1974) is an Indo-Australian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.
With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.
Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.
In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.
Nothing gives us greater pride than the importance of India's scientific and engineering colleges, or the army of Indian scientists at organizations such as Microsoft and NASA. Our temples are not the god-encrusted shrines of Varanasi, but Western scientific institutions like Caltech and MIT, and magazines like 'Nature' and 'Scientific American.
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.
I was looking for the key for years But the door was always open
An honest politician has no goodies to toss around. This limits his effectiveness profoundly, because political power in India is dispersed throughout a multi-tiered federal structure; a local official who has not been paid off can sometimes stop a billion-dollar project.
I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy. If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer!
The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave
India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.
You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.
I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.
I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are. "Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing? "We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.
Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.
. . . the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse
Indians mock their corrupt politicians relentlessly, but they regard their honest politicians with silent suspicion. The first thing they do when they hear of a supposedly 'clean' politician is to grin. It is a cliche that honest politicians in India tend to have dishonest sons, who collect money from people seeking an audience with Dad.
Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.