It's been on my shelf unregistered and unread for ages. I'll get to it one day.

Written as a series of letters to a Chinese dignitary, 'White Tiger' tells the story of Balram, an Indian entrepreneur. Of course, it's not quite that simple. To get himself into a position where he can sit in an office in Bangalore, beneath a chandelier and a ceiling fan and write letters to Chinese dignitaries, Balram has had to go through quite a lot. He's come from the Darkness, a part of rural India controlled by greedy and corrupt landlords named for animals, and populated by downtrodden, poverty stricken people like Balram and his extended family.

Balram tells his Chinese contact all about his escape from the Darkness, about how he grasped the opportunities that came his way, how he was mistreated or worse, ignored, by the rich he served until he hatched his plan to escape from servitude for good.

The story is told in a fairly linear fashion despite a major plot point being revealed early on to ensure the reader stays interested. The descriptions of life for India's poor are depressing and the rigidity of the caste system is explored. It's a decent enough book, with touches of humour amidst the squalor, but it fell short of some of the other books on India that I have read, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie spring to mind. Still worth a read though.

In the LFL.