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WHITE TIGER TEST – Take home part

Choose ten quotes from those below.
Paraphrase the quote in your own words.
Give the context for each quote. When and where does Balram say it?
Explain how the quote relates to Balram. What does the quote show about Balram? What does the quote reveal about the Indian society Balram exists in?

1. “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.”

2. “I was looking for the key for years

But the door was always open”

3. “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.”

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

5. “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.”

5. “Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred 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.”

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

7. “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.”

7. “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.”

8. “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? ”

9. “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 inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”

10. “...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”

11. “I thought, What a miserable life he's had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job

as a driver—and he is a good driver, no question of it, a far better one than I will ever be.Part of

me wanted to get up and apologize to him right there and say, You go and be a driver in Delhi.

You never did anything to hurt me. Forgive me, brother.

I turned to the other side, farted, and went back to sleep.”

12. “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.

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

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

13. “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.”

14. “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 would have done it, no doubt.”

15. “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.”