The White Tiger

This is India, not America. There's always a way out here

A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip‍

towns that have the pollution and noise and traffic of a big city – without any hint of the true city’s sense of history, planning, and grandeur. Half-baked cities, built for half-baked men

Once I was a driver to a master, but now I am a master of drivers. I don’t treat them like servants – I don’t slap, or bully, or mock anyone. I don’t insult any of them by calling them my ‘family’, either. They’re my employees, I’m their boss, that’s all. I make them sign a contract and I sign it too, and both of us must honour that contract. That’s all.

was walking in the same line, again and again – from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell.

He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this – that was the only way h

If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.

The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they?

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?

Losing weight and looking like the poor.

Brush. Brush. Spit.

Brush. Brush. Spit.

If only a man could spit his past out so easily.

When you’re the driver, you never see the whole picture. Just flashes, glimpses, bits of conversation – and then, just when the masters are coming to the crucial part of their talk – it always happens.