White Tiger Ideology

Echoing a tone synonymous with the political elite that gave political freedom to the nation after independence but denied its citizens the economic freedom to claw their way out of poverty, Asok, the US educated feudal scion in The White Tiger shudders at the prospect of parliamentary democracy in the hands of half-baked Indians like Balram. Whereas, Balram takes pride in being a half-baked entrepreneur “born and raised in Darkness” (The White Tiger, 10). There are many in India who have not been able to finish their schooling but stuffed with too many half formed ideas picked up randomly from school books, soiled newspapers, and from snatches of radio bulletins. According to Balram a potpourri such ideas turn these half-baked men into entrepreneurs and since the odds are loaded against them, such men must school themselves with experiments in falsehood as opposed to the Gandhian experiments with truth. Balram admits that he has always been a liar, and it is by lying that he has ensured his existence in a fiercely competitive world. His disloyalties do not fill him with remorse; instead rage overwhelms him. Every time he steals his master's money, he is reminded of how much the feudal

Since then, during the protectionist, post-Independence socialist phase, business and industry plunged into a fatal nosedive. In The White Tiger, Balram also traces the tragic history of his family's fall from entrepreneurship to slavery and deprivation to the evil days into which the country had fallen after Independence. He rues that with independence, the order that has been established over several centuries became chaotic and in the dog-eat-dog world of free India the caste identities, fashioned by the pursuit of specific trades by social groups for generations and through several centuries, suddenly lost its occupational