Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
A book review by Angela Arlia

any people turn to entertainment to escape their lives and to forget their troubles offering a means to enter into a completely different situation. That’s why movies and books are so popular. Entertainment allows people’s imaginations the liberty to break free from their present situation and to experience another world or just live a different life than the one they are currently leading.

I enjoy reading to explore different worlds. Traveling is also something I love to do. By reading books, I can travel without leaving the comfort of a good chair or paying exorbitant ticket prices. Sounds like a perfect match, doesn’t it?

Recently I took a voyage to the heart of India by way of the book The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. What a journey it was! I had a basic understanding of the culture gleaned piecemeal from conversations with co-workers and classes I had attended in college. But everything I knew turned out to just skim the surface of this fascinating culture.

The narrator of Adiga’s tale is a witty character named Balram Halwai, who carries us through a portion of his life while also filling us in on some of his back-story along the way. In the early pages we discover that our narrator has committed a crime, though we do not know what the crime is, how it was committed or why.  Given his apparently sordid past, can we even trust this character to deliver a truthful narrative of his life? Page-turner hook number one!  As the book opens, Balram’s social standing is in question. A dozen pages in, we see that he’s a poor man from a poor village. However, references to a room with an expensive chandelier, where Balram sits to write his history, give us an idea that his social standing is no longer as lowly as it once was. But how?  And that, dear reader, is the second hook that keeps you turning the pages.  The style and manner of the novel’s delivery both allure and mesmerize until you have unknowingly finished the book.

Through the eyes of Balram Halwai, we experience the class differences and corruption that happen, not only in India, but the world over. As we trace his life’s path with our narrator, a number of local traditions are illuminated, giving me a deeper understanding of the impact of certain aspects of the Indian culture—areas where my understanding had only been an inkling before reading the book. The importance of marriage and family are questioned and by the end of the book totally revisited. This happens to a number of common cultural themes as well.

When I closed this book, I felt as though my eyes had been opened. I walked away from the book with a smile on my face because I learned some things that I didn’t know before I started. That’s often the best part of reading a book—learning things we didn’t know and may not have been able to learn in any other way.