Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adigais an Indian-Australian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth23 October 1974
CountryIndia
book writing white
When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.
country writing class
Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.
struggle book miracle
Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.
fun office routine
In a sense, being a full-time writer is less fun because there's no office to go to anymore, there's no set routine, there's no schedule. It can be quite isolating.
government safe heroism
What keeps India safe really is the heroism of millions of poor Indians who every day reject the allure of terrorism. What keeps India safe is just the courage of poor Indians, not the actions of its government.
mother powerful war
Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed...she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India.
thinker listeners originals
I am not an original thinker-but I am an original listener.)
new-york years psychics
I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city.
want wordsworth
I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
school library members
Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.
cities grandfather four
I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.
country cities socialist-countries
Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
heart self hands
I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are. "Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing? "We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.
growing-up class my-family
In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.