Author series 14 - Arvind Adiga

Author series 14 

Arvind Adiga 

* 1974 – 

* Indian-Australian writer and journalist.

* His debut novel The White Tiger won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.

* He was born in Madras (Chennai).

* He is the fourth Indian born author to win Booker Prize after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai ( V.S Naipaul is also of Indian origin but was not born in India).

* Adiga’s second book Between the Assassinations (2008) features 12 interlinked short stories.

* His second novel and third book “Last Man in Tower” was published in UK in 2011.

Important Works

    

1. The White Tigers (2008)

        The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India’s class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy. He is praised one day as a rare “white tiger” by a visiting School inspector”.

      The novel depicts Balram’s killing his master in Delhi and flees to Bangalore. Ultimately he transcends his sweet maker caste and becomes a successful entrepreneur, establishing his own Taxi Service.

      In this novel Balram believes that there are two Indians – “The Impoverished Darkness of the Rural inner continent” and the “Light of urban coastal India”.

2. Between the Assassinations (2008)

         This novel counts for the period between the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. 

3. Last Man in Tower (2011)

 

           It tells the story of a struggle for a slice of shining Mumbai real estate. The protagonist of the novel is a retired schoolteacher named Yogesh A. Murthy, who is affectionately known as Masterji.