Liftoff and the White Tiger

I’m writing from London Heathrow, en route to Delhi.

I moved my flight forward almost 24 hours and chose to route through Heathrow instead of JFK to avoid winter storm Fern, which indeed resulted in the cancellation of my previously-booked flight:

I’m also not opposed to getting an extra day in Delhi. Now I arrive in the morning instead of at night. Going to be exhausted — I slept 3.5 hours on the redeye from SF to London — but if I sleep a bit more on the plane to Delhi, I imagine I’ll be able to push through. I do have some NyQuil I might dip into.

Here I am fully outfit for my trip:

Yep, that’s it! Just one backpack, carefully packed. Feels good to travel this light, though I’m already regretting that I brought only one book, which I finished on the plane. The airport bookshop in Heathrow is lacking in anything India-adjacent (except Shantaram, which seemed too big/heavy to lug around — but perhaps I should pick it up anyway). The aged Kindle I took from my mom also appears to be dead — old devices often have very poor battery lives so perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise.

The reason I need a new book is because I finished “The White Tiger” on the plane, a fantastic novel by Aravind Agida. I was looking for a contemporary work by an Indian author, and boy did this deliver. Equal part pulpy mystery and biting social commentary, I feel like I’m arriving in the country with a better sense of the (horrific) situation afflicting India’s innumerable poor. They’re living in a situation slightly above slavery — one in which, to paraphrase Agida, you cannot be good even if you want to. Your life is according to the whims of your master. Reading this book helped me understand why so many Indians seem frustrated with their country’s image as a thriving democracy upholding Gandhi’s value of universal human rights. The reality, says Agida, is much the opposite: the country is afflicted with deep corruption and there’s no way out for vast numbers of ordinary people. Modernization may have improved some things, but it has also accelerated the ways in which the poor can be exploited, allowing landlords to own even the roads rickshaw drivers drive on and to tax those drivers accordingly.

The protagonist of the book, the proverbial white tiger, is an entrepreneur working in Bangalore, at that time (and maybe still?) one of India’s fastest-growing tech hubs. Agida seems sympathetic to tech as an industry in which one can become an “entrepreneur,” which for him is a path out of “the darkness” (extreme poverty) and into “the light”. But he also understands that for Indians in the darkness to even enter the tech industry, or indeed to make it out of the darkness in any form whatsoever, may require a catastrophic act of destruction for which few but the most sociopathic are prepared. Therefore, he says, capitalism continues to work as intended: elevating the most ruthless into positions of power and success while penalizing the privileged who do not properly uphold the social order by disciplining their servants.

That said, the White Tiger was written pre-2010, so we’ll see how all this holds up today. I expect it gives at least a decent picture!

If you have other books about India to recommend, please send ‘en my way. I’m reachable on email ([email protected]) and WhatsApp (+15106797990). Thanks for reading!