The White Tiger: An Incisive Social Commentary on Religion, Caste, Class and Democracy in India

[Riaz Haq]

Few films about India offer the kind of incisive social commentary that the recently released "The White Tiger" does. Based on a novel of the same name by Aravind Adiga, it tells  the story of a poor but ambitious young man from a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The film touches on religion, caste, class and democracy in India. It is directed by Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani and now available on Netflix. 

The White Tiger: Adarsh Gourav, Priyanka Chopra and Rajkummar Rao

The movie opens with a scene showing Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav) looking back at his life. It follows up with a series of long flashbacks to tell his story. Along the way, Balram sarcastically compares India's democracy with China's sanitation system. “If I were in charge of India, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy.” Numerous scenes in the film illustrate poor sanitation in India by showing Balram and others squatting and defecating in the open. 

Raised in an Indian village, Balram is determined to rise above his "halwai" (confectioner) caste in India's rigidly defined caste system which makes any such escape extremely difficult. He persuades a corrupt landlord known as the Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar) and his son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) to give him a job as a back-up driver.  Ashok is married to Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), a chiropractor who grew up in the United States.   

Balram soon replaces the primary driver (Girish Pal) by revealing his Muslim identity which he was hiding to work for the Islamophobic Stork. Balram spends most of his time working for Ashok.  Ashok’s older brother, referred to as Mukesh Sir or the Mongoose (Vijay Maurya), doesn't  particularly like Balram. Unlike Ashok who has studied abroad, the Mongoose character accepts India’s culture of corruption and participates in it willingly. The Mongoose visits Delhi regularly to help Ashok distribute bags full of cash to politicians and bureaucrats. He also helps Ashok deal with his sadness when Pinky suddenly leaves him to return to the United States.  

The White Tiger is a well-made film. I recommend it to anyone interested in understanding the real life in India. 

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[Riaz Haq]

When a bathroom towel restored an Indian bureaucrat's pride

Soutik Biswas
BBC India correspondent

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57817614

Specially marked towels, height-adjustable chairs to rise above the rest, a tsunami of permissions and an unrelenting battle to improve punctuality.

These are some of the features about India's bureaucracy that a leading academic and former chief economic adviser to the government found during a three-year-long tenure.

Kaushik Basu, who later became World Bank chief economist, took leave from his position as a professor at Cornell University in the US to join the federal government in 2009, at the invitation of then-prime minister Manmohan Singh.

His newly published memoir, Policymaker's Journal (Simon & Schuster), brims with light-hearted and revealing anecdotes about how India's gargantuan bureaucracy operates.

Yes sir!
The use of the word, sir, is very common in Indian officialdom.

During a government meeting, Prof Basu recounts, he decided to keep a tab on how many times the word was said.

A senior official, he counted, was saying sir, "on average 16 times every minute (there was a minister present)".

Assuming it took her half a second to say the word, Prof Basu calculated that 13% of the official's speaking time was spent saying sir.

Do have 'prior permission'
Nobody can hurt me without my permission, Mahatma Gandhi had said.

But Prof Basu found one needed permission for the smallest of things in the government. (India's government accounts for 57% of formal employment in the country.)

"The requests for permissions generally get passed up the pyramidal structure of the government; and a surprising amount of trivia go all the way to the top, namely, to the minister."

So people seek permissions for literally everything - from wanting to take off for a day to visit an ailing relative to changing the brand of coffee served in the ministry, and needing another attendant to keep the restrooms clean.

"All such proposals move in a chain of hard cardboard folders, tied with strings, from one room to another acquiring notings from senior members of the bureaucracy," Prof Basu writes.

Don't knock on the door!
Professor Basu found it is "impolite to knock" in officialdom. "Either you have the right to enter a person's office or you don't."

So if you have the right, the "norm is go right in".

"It has taken me a while to adjust to this custom, it being such a strict norm in the West to knock before entering," he writes.

But he faced a small problem, adjusting to the new norm.

"What made the adjustment harder is that, given the high humidity in India, many doors are swollen and jammed, and so one needs to push against them for them to open," he writes.

"The upshot is that not only do you not knock when entering someone's office, but you often end up entering the room like a cannon ball, as the door suddenly gives way."

'Delay must be avoided'
In the finance ministry, Prof Basu found that each folder to keep papers and documents had two inside pages with 44 common phrases used by heads of departments and senior officers.

What was fascinating is how many of them were about avoiding delays and being punctual:

Expedite action
Delay cannot be waived
Delay must be avoided
Delay must be explained
Reply today/early/immediately without delay
Issue today
"If despite such urging India continues to be unpunctual; we deserve appreciation for tenacity," writes Prof Basu.

Having said that, he concedes India is a much more punctual country than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

Do you have the right chair?
In official meetings, status matters. The height of a chair can give it a little boost, Prof Basu found.

"If you are on a relatively higher chair, peering down on others, it gives you an advantage in meetings."

To achieve this, Prof Basu found an easy technique.