2010-10-07

Page 249-276: "The Seventh Night"

Summary:
His plan was to go to Bangalore alone, but now he realizes his plan with Dahram. As he wants to get a tea after three days of travelling down south by train, he sees his police poster on the wall of the shop. But as mentioned, the inaccurate informations are no danger for him. He needs four weeks in Bangalore to calm his nervs.
Then he starts searching for a new job. He starts listening to people and everything seems to be down to one thing: outsorcing. He watches buildings at the electronic city and sees some taxis at night. He rents a car for driving people working for some others overseas, but they already have a driving service. So he goes to the police, gives a bribe to them and after there's a police raid in the competing driving service, he way is free. This is how he gets his own start-up.
Now, the start-up is grown into big business. He has 16 employees and he's worth fifteen times the sum he took from Ashok (700.000*15=10500000 rupees). He also took a new name: Ashok Sharma.

The reason he stopped telling two days ago was a driver who has killed a man on a bike. As Balram arrives, there are a policeman, the dead's brother, passengers and the driver. Balram induced the driver to bring them passengers to their destination and went to the police-station with the brother, the police helps Balram out.
He visits the dead's family and gives them money because he wants to, but not has to.The father says: "At least you were man enough to come." Balram says he visited them, because he can't live the way the landlords do.
Dharam visits an English school and lives along with Balram, never mentioning his family.
Balram thinks about what he would do if driving service becomes boring: one thought of him ist to get into real estate business.

Finally his opinion is, that it was worth it just to be a servant for a minute.
"I think i'm ready to have children"


My opinion: 
1. The corrunpt system in India has a large part in Balram's story. At first, there is the corrupt schoolteacher who steals things to get rich on them, second theres Ashok and his family bribing politicians for paying no tax and at least there the inspector who gets bribed for Balram being successful.
I wouldn't like the idea to live in a corrupt country because success does not depend on personal endeavours but also on money you give to corrupt people. That means, you can be as successful as you want, if theres someone paying a higher bribe, he will replace you. It also destroys the judicial system of a country. I don't like the idea that people can do illegal things without being sentenced just because of bribes.
2. Balram says that he don't wants a child raising up as a servant because he is. It think it's the right decision for him, because of two reasons: at first he has the possibility to get out of being a servant because he's the "white tiger" and secondly, if he had a own small family at the point he decided to start a new life, they would have been killed if he takes the money. At this point he was only responsible for his own life (and his family he had never a good relation to) and I think that he wouldn't be able to take this step with might being  responsible for someone he loves death. Now that he free of slavery and build his own business he's right with saying he's ready to have children.


Links:
- http://deepakshamli.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/corruption12.jpg (a cartoon about corruption)
- http://www.corruptioninindia.org/ (a very interesting page with links to articles about corruption in India)

1 comment:

  1. You did a very thorough reading and have covered nearly all the novel's major events told and aspects mentioned.

    Your style of writing is very fluent, which on the one hand sometimes leads you astray with respect to grammar and vocabulary, but on the other makes the reading experience a quite pleasant one. Keep on like that! Nevertheless there are some spelling mistakes.

    Your thoughts are interesting, though sometimes I would have appreciated a little more elaborated statements, which you are certainly capable of. In certain postings you did not provide any thoughts and/or linksat all.

    The links are ok so far. All in all this is one excellent reading diary.

    ReplyDelete