The White Tiger School Essay

1323 Words6 Pages
Success can be defined in many different ways depending on who is defining it and with that comes various ways of achieving it. In Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger Balram Halwai, a poor man from the "darkness" of contemporary India, narrates his life story to the Premier of China through letters in seven consecutive nights. Balram becomes a driver for Mr. Ashok; a rich and powerful man that had just come back from America and moves to New Delhi. As he drives around with Ashok, Balram is exposed to the corruption within society, including Ashok himself and the government. Balram’s success was to escape the darkness, the poverty, and the future that was guaranteed to him by society. Balram attempts to overcome his social and economic position bestowed upon him and plans to achieve his success with any means possible. With that goal, he decides to murder his master and leave his family behind. Through his letters to the premier, Balram implies that he has to kill Ashok to succeed, but he justifies this murder with the act of betrayal between the bond of master and servant and the lack of individualism he has to face. Throughout his life Balram had to face many types of influences, at one point he sees Mr. Ashok as the biggest influence to his perpetual servitude and he decides he must overcome him by erasing the mindset of being a servant. After expressing his anger the previous night, Balram moves onto describing the marketplace where a butcher works and about the chickens trapped in their cages with no effort to escape. Balram describes this scene as the "Rooster Coop," a symbol to represent how the poor are unable to escape and how they have no intentions of freeing themselves. Balram writes, " A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent―as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way―to exist in perpetual servitude, a servitude so
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