It offers a pretty dismal picture of the state of affairs in the ‘other India’ which is ‘not shining’, especially of the abject poverty and misery that large sections of the country’s population still wallow in. It is even more painful because Adiga’s book is quite unalloyed by deliberate malice or motivated overstatement.

It has now become an annual Indian tradition to look forward eagerly to the announcement in October each year of the Man Booker Prize for the best work of fiction in English by an author from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Even the Nobel Prize for literature does not enthuse the country that much, presumably because an Indian winner of the prize is so extremely unlikely with just one past awardee in the last 110 years or thereabouts.

When Arundhati Roy (born October 24, 1961) won it in 1997, she was the youngest woman ever to win the award. Her record was eclipsed by Kiran Desai (born September 3, 1971) when, in 2006, she became the youngest woman ever to win the award. Now, Adiga, born in 1974, is younger than either of them was at the time of receiving the award. In fact, he is the second youngest ever to win the award after Ben Okri who had won it, in 1991, at the age of 32. Bravo young India! For India, it was a minor embarrassment of riches this year with the Booker shortlist nominations. If Adiga had not won it, the award could well have still gone to another Indian, Amitava Ghosh (The Sea of Poppies), who was also on the shortlist.

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, Nobel Prize, Arvind Mills, Arundhati Roy, Young Indian writers, Wall Street Journal, White Tiger, Entrepreneurship development, Misgovernance, Unflagging entrepreneurship, Financial Times.