Balram lives in the Darkness - in a matriarchal household, taken away from school to be able to contribute to the family's meagre income. His tale is that of so many people in the subcontinent - those who see their parents dying (Balram's father dies of tuberculosis) in a hospital with no medical care available, mass rigging of elections, and the lack of any basic resource. But he manages to find a job with the resident landlord-oppressor family as a driver. And this job takes him to Delhi; the political hub of power in India and a huge metropolitan city. And even if Balram has entered the 'Light' - India's shining cosmopolitanism - the book takes a darker turn here.

Based against the landscape of Gurgaon, Delhi's upscale area that boasts a stretch of malls - Balram's 'masters' are the landlord's son - the educated, urbane Ashok and his American wife, Pinky. And while Balram's naiveté as a village boy in the big city may drag the novel a bit, it picks up with its imagery of the political landscape, the snippets of bribery and corruption, the lifestyle of the elite's drivers, and a window into Ashok's soul, who Balram likes and often despises in equal measure. Yet Balram's upbringing is one of servitude, and to respect that master-servant relationship is all that he knows. And Aravind Adiga describes the sentiments felt by the perpetually downtrodden best by the theory of the 'Rooster Coop' - which as Balram tells Wen Jiabao.

"When you get here, you'll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop." Adiga draws a comparison between chickens that see their peers being slaughtered before their eyes yet do not attempt to escape from the coop, to how servants do not usually disobey their masters, simply because they are too scared of the havoc that could be wrecked upon their families back in the villages - and so the cycle goes on. As Balram says, "The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy... A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude; 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."

Yet despite being stuck in the 'Great Indian Rooster Coop' how Balram becomes a rich entrepreneur sees the book taking a calculated, yet chilling turn. And perhaps, Aravind Adiga's fictional tale should serve as a wake up call to many of the elite in Pakistan who forget that mistreating those in their employ can have its own dark consequences.

As I write this review, a handful of my Indian and Pakistani acquaintances are reading The White Tiger - and lapping it up because of the stark mental images it evokes. And I suspect, for those who have been unable to cross the Wagah border, the desire to see how the 'hidden side' of India actually looks like. And apparently copies of The White Tiger have been flying off the shelves at bookstores in hundreds (the last figure I heard being 500 copies sold to date at a Karachi bookstore). Aravind Adiga's writing style brings the smells and sounds of villages and metropolitans to life, engaging the reader in a way that only writers from the subcontinent do best.

In a starker and closer to home parallel, Pakistani TV news channels and newspapers are currently ablaze with images of parents giving up their children for adoption because they cannot feed and house them anymore, due to rising inflation and food costs. The despair and hopelessness of the masses - even if that term in itself is quite clichéd, and so often hypocritically evoked by the powers that rule - has spiralled its way out of control.

In these times The White Tiger is an accurate reflection of life for those who have no shining beacon of hope ala Obama to look forward to, and in its matter of fact way, compels one to understand the psychology of those who ardently wish to climb the social ladder.

And while The White Tiger may be looked upon with a cynical eye, for its own stereotype of the un-incredible India that caught the eye of the Booker Prize jury and the foreign critics that have raved about it, it is a book that is definitely a must read for this year, even if its imagery may leave readers haunted for a while.

Indian critics slam
The White Tiger
Ritu Sethi, folk-art expert said, "I felt the book took us back three decades. It had every stereotype going in it. The BBC used to show nothing but cows on the roads for years. We're back to that with this book."

Author and playwright Manjula Padmanabhan dismissed it as "a tedious, unfunny slog".She agreed that much of the recent hype about India as an emerging superpower was dishonest and complacent but asked: "Is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do?"

"I used to hate Naipaul for talking contemptuously about India, about how cleaners mop the floor in restaurants by crouching and moving like crabs and all that talk about Indians defecating in the open," said a freelance editor, Anjali Kapoor. "Adiga is the same, focussing on everything that is bad and disgusting."

William Green, former Time Asia Editor understands why the book has raised Indian hackles. "It is an unsettling novel, it touches very raw nerves, but I think he captures the complexity and subtlety of India in fiction in a way that you don't see in journalism," he says.

- Excerpt from the article 'Indians fear Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger says too much about them' printed in The Telegraph