“From the way the wheels crunched it completely, and from how there was no noise when she stopped the car , not even a whimpering or a barking, I knew what had happened to the thing we had hit” (Adiga 138). This excerpt exemplifies the monotonous truth that struggles but soldiers through Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’: the progress of a developing nation sacrifices the sensitivities of a Western world made comfortable by its superior quality of life. From the armchair of a six story air-conditioned library the passive insensitivity towards human life exhibited in ‘White Tiger’ elevates our own esteemed understanding of morality and even justice. The clever, enigmatic narrator—satirical and blasphemous in a way that plays into our ideas of intellectual worthiness—kills his ‘master’. But because we value wit, thoughtfulness, and criticism (and perhaps because we retrace our own less than perfect records) we must wonder if the notions of piety, justice, and goodness are irreparably damaged by a character born into the troubled India we have surveyed this semester and understand to be blighted by poverty and desperation.
In America, we run over cats and dogs, mostly by accident. In India, wandering children, described as black things, are reduced analogously to stray pets, that may or may not be worthy of preservation. “Will anyone miss her? … No, probably not” (Adiga 140). It wasn’t a white tiger, so it wasn’t worth saving.
No comments:
Post a Comment