The White Tiger "The First Night"

And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.

And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.

But then it hit me that in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India's past, present, and future.

But then it hit me that in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India's past, present, and future.

I read about your history in a book, Exciting Tales of the Exotic East, that I found on the pavement, back in the days when I was trying to get some enlightenment by going through the Sunday secondhand book market in Old Delhi.

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.

When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore and became one of its most successful (though probably least known) businessmen, you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious twenty-first century of man.

It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.

Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull.

So: I'm closing my eyes, folding my hands in a reverent namaste, and praying to the gods to shine light on my dark story.

A statutory warning—as they say on cigarette packs—before we begin.

He's half-baked.

To give you the basic facts about me—origin, height, weight, known sexual deviations, etc.—there's no beating that poster.

I'm not a sentimental man, Mr. Jiabao.

And here it is, on the screen, in front of me: Assistance Sought in Search for Missing Man General Public is hereby informed that the man in the picture namely Balram Halwai alias MUNNA son of Vikram Halwai rickshaw-puller is wanted for questioning.

The teacher and I had a spat about the definition of a word.

Which black river am I talking of—which river of Death, whose banks are full of rich, dark, sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it?

Now, you have heard the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and hundreds of American tourists come each year to take photographs of naked sadhus at Hardwar or Benaras, and our prime
minister will no doubt describe it that way to you, and urge you to take a dip in it.

Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.

Her teeth were all gone, but this only made her grin more cunning.

I smelled the river before I saw it: a stench of decaying flesh rising from my right.

Chunks of wood were being built into funeral pyres on the steps of the ghat that went down into the water; four bodies were burning on the ghat steps when we got there.

Underneath the platform with the piled-up fire logs, there was a giant oozing mound of black mud where the river washed into the shore.

On either side of the ooze, a market: three more or less identical shops selling more or less identically adulterated and stale items of rice, cooking oil, kerosene, biscuits, cigarettes, and jaggery.

These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao.

Electricity poles—defunct.

Children—too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India.

She was a fat, glossy-skinned creature, with a vein the size of a boy's penis sticking out over her hairy snout, and long thick pearly spittle suspended from the edge of her mouth; she sat all day in her own stupendous crap.

A hand stirs me awake…I shake my brother Kishan's legs off my tummy, move my cousin Pappu's palm out of my hair, and extricate myself from the sleepers.

Lotuses and lilies float all over the pond, the water sparkles like silver, and the water buffalo wades, chewing on the leaves of the lilies, and setting off ripples that spread in big V's from her snout.

They were not allowed to sit on the plastic chairs put out for the customers; they had to crouch near the back, in that hunched-over, squatting posture common to servants in every part of India.

There was another fellow inside the Ambassador; a stout one with a bald, brown, dimpled head, a serene expression on his face, and a shotgun on his lap.

There was a giant cupboard in my classroom, whose door was always slightly ajar—no one knew what it was there for.

The missing man was employed as driver of a Honda City vehicle at the time of the alleged incident.

The man in the blue safari suit—the inspector—pointed his cane at holes in the wall, or the red discolorations, while the teacher cowered by his side and said, "Sorry sir, sorry sir."

Now, being praised by the school inspector in front of my teacher and fellow students, being called a "White Tiger," being given a book, and being promised a scholarship: all this constituted good news, and the one infallible law of life in the Darkness is that good news becomes bad news—and soon.

To break the law of his land—to turn bad news into good news—is the entrepreneur's prerogative.

I don't keep a cell phone, for obvious reasons—they corrode a man's brains, shrink his balls, and dry up his semen, as all of us know—so I have to stay in the office.

The long loopholes in its wall turned into lines of burning pink at sunrise and burning gold at sunset; the blue sky shone through the slits in the stone, while the moon shone on the jagged ramparts, and the monkeys ran wild along the walls, shrieking and attacking each other, as if they were the spirits of the dead warriors reincarnated, refighting their final battles.

And these entrepreneurs—we entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.