The White Tiger

I finished reading my first book in a long time: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. What a fantastic piece of work. The India he portrayed is my reality from June 24th onwards to the middle of August, a few days before my junior year at Duke University will commence.

Granted, I won’t be a rickshaw puller, an entrepreneur, or a taxi driver, but as I’ll course through the streets of New Dehli on the first week — in air-conditioned cars chaperoned by men hired from Shiv Nadar’s HCL corporation — I won’t be able to forget Balram Halwai’s cutting musings on the underside of life.

India won’t be the generic mix and mash of colorful cloth, people, traffic, and food montaged against a backdrop of traditional Hindi music like the intro to Discovery Channel travelogues. It’s a place. A world. A reality I’ll only glide through in a protected bubble.

I see myself in a bubble, unable to actually be in their world. Though I can’t touch them, I can communicate. But maybe from within that bubble, the students will be able to decipher my movements, understand the words my lips are mouthing and be able to mimic strands of life here and there. Maybe that mimicry will lodge themselves as facts into their minds and become useful for them when they move forward and out of the Darkness.

I’ll be a teacher. I will co-teach English and share with them the joy of listening through my film classes. I will listen to them and, in turn, share their stories with the world. Or, at least, the people in the Corporate Towers in New Dehli (maybe Shiv Nadar himself), and a few dozen people on the internet.

Because, you know, most of them probably won’t turn into filmmakers. I probably won’t, but using this subject as a tool, I can share what I find to be the greatest gift in life. The ability to listen to someone and empathize. Now I’ll have to find ways of wrapping that up in career-oriented usefulness, but the core message will remain intact. It’s like a pill. The inside will be what it is, but I can spray paint the outside with whatever color will allow it to pop into the mouths of children and be swallowed.

This cannot be published on the Duke Engage Indy tumblr page.

I just asked HCL if they could forward my question to Shiv Nadar:

“What is the biggest sacrifice you had to make in order to make yourself a success?”