The White Tiger Analysis

Balram finds that the liberated individuals have set up innumerable technology outsourcing companies in the India of Light that “virtually run America now” (The White Tiger 4). He lacks the education or business acumen to build a technology start-up. Instead, he puts his driving skills, knowledge of cars and drivers and the capital he has stolen from Ashok to good use by setting up a business that serves the need of the burgeoning IT industry. He provides them with unmatched logistical solutions and gets an indirect toehold in the outsourcing world, the poster boy of India’s economic liberalisation. Though Balram becomes hugely successful in business, he does not brag about it like the brash IT honchos of Bangalore, whom he condemns for their
. . . The entire city is masked in smoke, smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like? (The White Tiger 191). Since he also harbours a fear that Bangalore might turn out into a disaster by developing at a faster clip than the rate at which it can possibly solve its problems, he wants to do his bit to shape its future. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman observes that globalisation “can push down to the local level and to the weakest individuals more power, opportunities and resources to become shapers than ever before” (397). Balram does not want to stand back and watch like all those trapped lives in the pre-liberalised India of Between the Assassinations and those he had left behind to their fates in the India of Darkness. He wants to take up responsibilities and be a part of “all that is changing in this country,” instead of waiting endlessly for nothing to happen like the hapless tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (The White Tiger 191). He wants to help shape the emergent identity to build “a new Bangalore for a new India” and proudly claim that in his own way he fashioned it
Even the redoubtable Masterji’s Gandhian identity, despite his stoic resistance to materialism, is also shaped by his acute concerns about money. Despite having more money than he needs to take care of himself, he often walks a long distance to make free phone calls from his old school with the connivance of a friendly librarian there. Just like his friend Sanjiv Puri, the Accountant who out of habit embezzles money from him by fudging the account books of their shared expenses, he is also no paragon of virtue when it comes to money. Materialistic concerns of Masterji even restrains him from praising Neena, the servant girl who cooks for the Puris, for her excellent prawn curry fearing that she might ask for a raise and inconvenience her employers. In an overwhelmingly materialist world, one cannot but help become that which one resists. One of the greatest merits of New Historicist analysis is that it not only brings the awareness that discourses shape human identities, but its processes also allow opposing discourses to collide with each other so that it provokes independent thought and action which can have emancipative effects in the present. Unlike the Masterji, Ibrahim