Aravind Adiga Quotes

“Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn't mean that they are all about to slit their masters' necks. Of course they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses — and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. you see, the murdered in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him — and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary.

It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“We may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“The Great Socialist himself is said to have embezzled one billion rupees from the Darkness, and transferred that money into a bank account in a small, beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain.
The difference is everything.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and knicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal, indestructible.”
― Aravind Adiga