Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. He is the author of Selection Day, the Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger, and the story collection Between the Assassinations.

From his interview with Alex Clark at the Guardian:

Selection Day is about a father who envisages a grand future in Indian cricket for his sons. Was it prompted by your love for the sport?

No. Actually, it comes from something close to disgust with the way cricket is played in India. It’s often said that cricket and Bollywood are the two real religions of India, which unite people of all backgrounds, and there’s much truth to that.

What is it that repels you about it?

There’s always been a fair amount of money involved in cricket in India. But what has happened in the last two decades is that, ironically, this game that in some ways began in England and was, if you will, an aristocratic backlash against emergent industrial capitalism – that game has become the spearhead of the new Indian capitalism, in the sense that cricket is used to...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.

--Marshal Zeringue