How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

By Mohsin Hamid

I am not a fan of Mohsin Hamid. I didn’t quite get the character of the Reluctant Fundamentalist and so couldn’t quite believe in its plot (Nagarkar’s God’s Little Soldier was a more credible and affecting exposition of a liberal Muslim turning fundamentalist, even though it wasn’t Nagarkar’s best work). And I could not get past the first fifty pages of Moth Smoke.

The title of Hamid’s latest though, was intriguing. And it does turn out to be the best of his three books, in my opinion. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is not a story that’s not been told before. In fact, it so totally recalls Adiga’s White Tiger that you can’t but help compare the two. Both have protagonists that feed off South Asia’s liberalized economies and climb out of debilitating poverty to a measure of wealth unbelievable a generation ago. Both use forms of storytelling a tad too clever, but which make an already engaging story even more so. But it’s been a few years since we read Adiga. And so it comes to pass that Hamid’s latest has a certain freshness that takes you by surprise and a momentum that has you racing to the finish of its relatively short length.

The protagonist is unnamed. As is the country. It could as easily be India as Pakistan, New Delhi as Islamabad, Mumbai as Karachi. The story is told in the form of a self-help book, a parody of the innumerable ‘How to’ books that are so ubiquitous in bookshops today. And amazingly, Hamid manages to sustain a second person narrative through the entire book, without disconcerting the reader even a little bit. But what made the book for me, were nuggets of real insights into what makes for success or failure in our nations today. “There are forks on the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter’s assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree,” or “Meeting the gaze of a landlord has been a risky business in these parts for centuries, perhaps since the beginning of history. Recently some men have begun to do it. But they have beards and earn their keep in the seminaries.”

The story moves on predictably but interestingly. The protagonist joins the buzzing beehive that the country is now, becomes an entrepreneur, falls in love, keeps the love in abeyance, marries, befriends bureaucrats and politicians, uses a little help from the local mafia along the way, reaches the zenith and then slowly, inevitably begins the slide back down again. Yet however much he falls, Rising Asia ensures he never falls back into that penury from which he began. It is a narrative that despite the cruelty and occasional crudity of poverty, struggle and strife, has a certain gentleness to it. There is real love and tenderness, between parents and children, brother and sister, boy and girl, even between estranged husband and wife.

And that is where this book irrevocably diverges from Adiga’s White Tiger. The brutality and abiding anger of Balram Halwai is absent and so is the discomfort an average middle class Indian felt while reading White Tiger. This is a gentler book. And that perhaps is also the reason ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’ won’t stay with me as long as White Tiger did. It still is, however, a very good read.

The White Tiger

By Aravinda Adiga

Adiga’s debut novel has been acclaimed as the one that questions the India Shining story, the one that puts paid to the hype of the emerging super power. It describes an India that has been left behind in the New India dream of the middle classes. In a state that is obviously Bihar, Adiga creates a character called Balram Halwai and gives him a voice. It is a voice that is unlike any that we have seen so far in English Indian fiction – brutal, simmering with obvious anger, yet laced through with sardonic dark humour. Balram Halwai is a man who has come up from the depths of grinding poverty to become one of New India’s stories of successful entrepreneurship. And in a series of letters he writes to the Chinese Premier on a state visit to India (a devilish ploy by Adiga, given our obsession with comparisons with China), he describes the route he takes to get where he is.

Balram is born Munna (there are so many children in his joint family in Laxmangarh, the elders forget to name him and it is left to a school teacher to do so), the son of a rikshaw-puller. As in the case of all the men in his family, he is forced to drop out of school and work in a tea shop when one of his sisters needs the money for her marriage. But Balram is no ordinary boy – he is canny, intelligent and has the street-smartness to figure a way out of the misery of the tea-shop worker. He takes driving lessons and becomes the local landlord’s driver. And thus begins his life of servitude to the landlord and his family. For a driver is not just a driver in the Indian household – he is the cook, if there isn’t one, a masseuse and a general man Friday. For a few thousand rupees, Balram pledges his undying allegiance to his master’s family. When Ashok, the America-returned son of the master moves to Delhi, Balram moves with him as his driver. For the ‘sponge’ as Balram calls himself, the move is most fortuitous. For it is here that the India of Light and the India of Darkness collide. This is where migrants from the Darkness, like Balram, meet the shining new malls and glass-towered suburbs of Light. This is where they see the true nature of their servitude. And this is where Balram acts out the most decisive chapter in his route to entrepreneurship – the killing of his master.

For most middle class Indians, this is an uncomfortable book. We know there is something wrong in a world where the price of a dress or a meal in a restaurant is as much as the salary you pay your driver. Adiga brings home to us truths that we’d much rather not see – the divide between the two Indias, the geographic inequality of progress, the corruption that vitiates our democracy. Yet strangely enough, it is not a bleak book. Balram Halwai becomes an entrepreneur, creating jobs and bringing prosperity to more people like him. The sheer venality of the route he employs and the absence of any remorse might make us squirm. Yet, he does manage to escape the fate he was born to, becoming a success in spite of the system. It’s a bit like watching Guru and the Ambani story. There might not be murder in that success story, but there sure was corruption.

Adiga’s book is a compulsive and riveting read. His Balram Halwai is a character that is sure to remain in the reader’s mind for a while, like the policeman Khatekar in Sacred Games and the bar girls in Maximum City. As I finished reading the book, the Booker announced Adiga as the winner. Does The White Tiger feature among my favourite Booker winners? No. Adiga is no Salman Rushdie. Nor does he write as beautifully as Arundhati Roy. But he tells a topical story in a compelling almost un-put-downable manner. It definitely is one of the better books to come out of the Indian fiction scene in the past few years.