The White Tiger

Today I finished the book I'd begun on the plane over here, The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. A lot of book clubs have read it recently, and it won the Man Booker prize in 2008. It's about an Indian driver who, we find out in the first chapter, murders his master. It's a fascinating commentary on village and urban life in India today, satirical and funny, and thoroughly enjoyable. Even though it took me all these weeks to finish it, you have to remember, we were going through a lot of settling in, and I took it in in small doses so as to enjoy it longer. It's all written in a series of letters to Premier Jiaboa of China, who was scheduled to visit India in the coming weeks. Here's an excerpt from page 8 that I just love and have come back to:

"Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like 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 live with.

The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced.

But pay attention, Mr. Premier! Fully formed fellows, after twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives.

Entrepreneurs are made from the half-baked clay."

It's a great story, and I have to say, I have wondered if our driver shares any of his views.

John and I are just finishing up Sara, the spiritual story by Esther and Jerry Hicks, and I've found ebay, India, which will send us Book 2 for $7.00, free shipping. We're both enjoying still reading together at night even though this is not quite Harry Potter. We've become much more aware of all the things we appreciate, and we talk about how that changes how you enjoy life.

The kids have the day off for Labor Day, but John has a babysitting gig for the school day, and we have a professional development day at school. Both Widi and I are presenting separate workshops and attending some others. Not quite a day at the lake. But we are just six weeks away from our Diwali week vacation in mid-October. In other news our big shipment arrived this week and we are slowly unpacking all the books, towels, linens, and kitchenware we sent. We also have some nice family photos to make our apartment feel more like our new home.