Question

What are some of the major themes of The White Tiger?

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One of the major themes in The White Tiger is the complexity beneath national progress.  Balram narrates the story from a time when financial and industrial progress sweeps India, but while rich men get even richer and technological advances take over the country, poverty still lines the streets.  When Balram becomes the driver for Mr. Ashok, he is privy to the business conversations that occur in the backseat between Mr. Ashok and his brother, the Mongoose.  Balram soon learns that the family deals in bribery to run their business, and the family's success is a microcosm for what is happening in the country at large.  Balram understands that as long as he continues to work for such a family, he will forever remain in a lowly position.  This is in part what makes him long to become an entrepreneur.  Ironically, Balram's success comes as the result of murder, and he enters into the cycle of complexity that leads to progress.

Answer

One of the major themes in The White Tiger is the power of corruption to weaken the morals of any person living in that society. This is expressed through Balram's experiences and choices throughout the novel.
Balram is never expressly a good person, but he appears to be shaped by the society around him. When he thinks about his country, he thinks about the rampant poverty and the experiences that shaped him as a child. However, he did try to do the right things at first. He worked to get an education and then took low-paying jobs in the hope of getting out of the cycle of poverty in which he and his father were stuck.
As he is exposed to more of the corruption and cruelties of his society, Balram changes. He is less willing to work hard because he sees that hard work isn't the way to obtain power or fortune. Even the man he works for gets ahead because he's willing to bribe the President—a man who, himself, is corrupt and being supported by those willing to cover up his crimes. The man eventually forces Balram to confess to a potential murder that the man's wife, Pinky, committed.
This and the increasingly immoral behavior of Ashok, his boss, corrupts Balram too. He begins to make choices that he didn't in the past, including stealing and plotting Ashok's murder. This is why he's ultimately on the run after completing his plan; he wasn't able to escape the corruption of the society and those around him. Instead, he decided to revel in it, be just as bad as the rest—and come away with a profit of the dead man's money.

Answer

The White Tiger is largely concerned with the caste system in India and the class conflict which arises from it. As a chauffeur, Balram gets a panoramic view of Indian society and all the different classes. While in the modern world the caste system can be cheated if one has enough money, Balram notices that most Indians are trapped in poverty and roles of servitude. As a result, much of society is money-grubbing and materialistic. To have money is to have power and importance. The effects of all this drive Balram to murder and it is in the murder that Balram tries to transcend the oppressive Indian class system.
When looked at through practical eyes, Balram ultimately murders his boss for seemingly no reason at all. He has little to gain in terms of money or materials. However, he does state that murdering someone of a higher class makes him feel like a human being—or in his words, gives him "the chance to be a man." As a servant, he is regarded as lesser than those in power. By taking Ashok's life, Balram is asserting his power in a way that cannot be disregarded by those of a higher class.
So, one of the big themes of the novel is that this tyrannical system twists people morally—not just the upper classes but the lower classes as well.

Answer

As a rare creature, Balram's nickname of "The White Tiger" is well-deserved. And because of his uniqueness, his complex ethnic identity that sets him apart from society, he doesn't feels himself subject to what he sees as the grossly hypocritical moral standards of independent India. In such an environment, Balram feels himself wholly entitled to devise his own moral code, one that will allow him to affirm himself and rise above his humble surroundings.
One of the book's most important themes is the inability of Indian society to tap into the deep well of spirituality that exists in the subcontinent's various religious traditions. Balram finds Indian society, for all its lip-service to spiritual values, to be as grasping and materialistic as any other. This creates a significant space in which strong individuals like him can create their own self-serving systems of morality while still displaying outward forms of devotion. Indeed, the kind of devotional life followed by millions of Indians unwittingly provides a useful cover for unscrupulous characters like Balram to commit blatantly immoral acts.

Answer

This story has a lot of themes, and I would say that multiple themes are central to the story and the main protagonist, Balram. One major theme is a theme of greed and materialism. Balram is a hardworking individual, and he has to put up with some fairly poor positions in the early parts of the book. He isn't motivated to work hard for the sake of working hard. He works hard because his motivation is earning more money to own more stuff as a way of maybe perhaps moving his overall societal ranking upward. That is another theme present in the book. India does have a caste system; however, Balram recognizes that the caste system can be gotten around if a person is wealthy enough. That end gain is enough to motivate Balram to kill Ashok, and that works as a strong example for the theme of morality. For Balram, morality is not a fixed target. It is flexible, and it can be molded around his present circumstances. Instead of realizing that he has done something amoral (like stealing or murder), Balram finds ways to justify and rationalize that particular action in order to avoid any kind of moral qualms.

The White Tiger

What are some of the major themes of The White Tiger?

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