The White Tiger | Quotes

“I was looking for the key for years, But the door was always open”
— Balram Halwai

“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.”
— Balram Halwai

“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave”
— Balram Halwai

“It's amazing. The moment you show cash, everyone knows your language.”
— Balram Halwai

“Go to Old Delhi and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds
of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see
the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they are next, yet they
cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with
humans in this country.”
— Balram Halwai

“The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
— Balram Halwai

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were
never allow history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy
remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you),
sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an
office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks
which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio
news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half
hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half-digested and half correct,
mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas
bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and
— Balram Halwai

You ask, 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of
you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.”
— Balram Halwai

“Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books”
— Balram Halwai
“So I stood around that big square of books. Standing around books, even books in a
foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency.
It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
"Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.”
— Balram Halwai

“Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in
English.”
— Balram Halwai

“Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy
in a sentence.”
— Balram Halwai

“Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this
world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from
China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in
India.”
— Balram Halwai

“It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by

praying to a Higher Power.
"I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse.
"Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices.
"See, the Muslims have one god.
"The Christians have three gods.
"And we Hindus have 36,000,004 divine arses to choose from.”
— Balram Halwai

“The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.”

— Balram Halwai

“A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous.”

— Balram Halwai

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

— Balram Halwai

“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.”
— Balram Halwai
“Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder...'
The point of living? My heart pounded the point of your living is that if you die, who's
going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month?”
— Balram Halwai

“Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t
have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage
system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality,
‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of
technology. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these
outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”
— Balram Halwai

“You can't expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet.”

— Balram Halwai

“Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. 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
strong that you can put the key to his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw
it back at you with a curse.”
— Balram Halwai

“These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election
fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they
have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and
win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough
policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs
discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.”
— Balram Halwai

“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade
of loathing?”
— Balram Halwai

“...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our
erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell
phone usage, and drug abuse”
— Balram Halwai

“Incidentally, sir, while we're on the topic of yoga - may I just say that an hour of deep
breathing, yoga, and meditation in the morning constitutes the perfect start to the
entrepreneur's day. How I would handle the stresses of this fucking business without
yoga, I have no idea. Make yoga a must in all Chinese schools - that's my suggestion.”
— Balram Halwai
“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.
— Balram Halwai

"Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade
of loathing?
— Balram Halwai

"We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.”
— Balram Halwai

“Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that
tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between
and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms,
sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your
fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi —
Balram Halwai

“He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of
poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't
be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-
thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying
to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win
a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of
course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise
men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which
appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood
correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-
thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.”
— Balram Halwai

“But isn't it likely that everyone in this world...has killed someone or other on their way
to the top? All I wanted was a chance to be a man--and for that, one murder is enough.”
— Balram Halwai

"To break the law of his land ... is the entrepreneur's prerogative."
— Balram Halwai, Chapter 1
Becoming an entrepreneur is not first about making money. It is learning to break
them. Balram rejects the hopelessness of the Darkness. He knows that he will have to
fight through oppression, the law of his land, to determine his own destiny.

"When your driver starts to read about Gandhi ... [then] it's time to wet your pants."
— Balram Halwai, Chapter 4
Balram jokes about masters who might be nervous about their drivers reading a
magazine called Murder Weekly that features scandalous tales of servants killing their
employers. No, he jokes, employers should really worry about servants reading stories
of revolutionaries like Mahatma Gandhi, who led the poor to cast out colonizers,
implying that employers are similarly oppressive.

"The greatest thing to come out of this country ... is the Rooster Coop."
— Balram Halwai, Chapter 5
The Indian economy relies on submissive workers willing to labor under oppressive
circumstances. The psychology of internalized servitude, embodied in the metaphor
of the Rooster Coop, is a product of Indian culture upon which the country's stability
and growth depend.

"The coop is guarded from the inside."

— Balram Halwai, Chapter 5
Servants keep other servants in line, but the agent trapping the poor inside the
metaphorical Rooster Coop is the Indian family. The threat of death to entire families
for one person's rebellion is enough to prevent most from attempting escape. And
Balram's Granny has shown repeatedly how she is willing to squeeze her family
members for every coin they can earn.

"I can't live the rest of my life in a cage, Granny. I'm so sorry."
— Balram Halwai, Chapter 7
When he comes face to face with a white tiger in a cage at the zoo, Balram faints, the
parallel to his own life all too apparent. In a daze, he offers an apology and
explanation to his grandmother, the representative of the family he endangers
with his rebellion.

"I wanted ... the chance to be a man—and for that, one murder was enough."
— Balram Halwai, Chapter 8
Balram maintains that murdering Mr. Ashok was necessary to gain a new life, the life
of a businessman from a higher caste .He only had to kill one man to enter into the
India of Light, unlike revolutionaries who had come before him.