The Rarest of Animals, the Creature that Comes Along Only Once in a Generation

For the sake of tidiness and avoiding mass clutter, and for my own personal need to quickly be able to recall these, I've broken up the previous wall of text. In The White Tiger, India's very own Aravind Adiga puts together a magically disturbing tale, a grim and satirical romp through an India most people never see or hear about, clamping a muzzle on the over-exotic Westernized story that continues to paint India with bright colors, festive music and magic carpets in some Aladdin-esque type of fantasy and chose to show India as it really is, with gritty, honest detail that takes a look at what it means to be moral and what it means to be free and how those two ideas collide. A few should do.

"Here's a strange fact: murder a man and you feel responsible for his life - possessive even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they know his fetus, you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life."

"To sum up - in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up."

"If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Ghandi to other people, but what do I know?"

"Being called a murderer: fine, I have no objection to that. It's a fact. I am a sinner, a fallen human. But to be called a murderer by the police!

What a fucking joke!"

"Free people don't know the value of freedom, that's the problem."

"'How many ways are there for a servant to cheat his master?'"

"I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor."

"The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India." 

"People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else - from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras.

The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read."

"My brain is too important, sir. It's all that a thinking man has in this world."

"One day a cunning Brahmin, trying to trick the Buddha, asked him, 'Master, do you consider yourself a man or a god?'

The Buddha smiled and said, 'Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.'

I'll give you the same answer to your question, Mr. Jiabo. You ask, 'Are you a man or a demon?'

Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us."

"Haven't I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making - the struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will rot in the black mud of the Mother Ganga?"

"All I wanted was the chance to be a man - and for that, one murder was enough."