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Hirsh Sawhney interviews Aravind Adiga, the author of the Booker-shortlisted novel The White Tiger. The novel tells the story of a village man who becomes a driver for a wealthy businessman, and in this interview Adiga punctures a hole in the notion that India is a rising world power with enviable economic growth.

Rail: Tell us about the India your book is set in.

Adiga: The book deals with an India smack in the middle of “the boom,” and it challenges a lot of comfortable assumptions about Indian democracy and economics. I want to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power.

Rail: What are some of the starker things you learned about India during this era of hype and optimism, when you were working as a reporter for Time?

Adiga: The fact that a lot of Indians have very little political freedom, especially in the north of India. That elections are rigged in large parts of the north Indian state of Bihar, and they’re also accompanied by violence. There’s like thirty-five killings during every election. If you were a poor man you’d have to pick China over India any day because your kids have a better chance of being nourished if you’re poor. Your wife is more likely to survive childbirth. You’re likely to live longer. There are so many ways in which India’s system fails horribly.

This, of course, is not quite what Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and others have been telling the American public about India for the last few years.

Good news in Agadir: As has been widely reported, the charges against Mohammed Erraji have been dropped, and he is now free.

Is Babar a cute, quaint children’s book series or a vile tool of neocolonialism? Adam Gopnik revisits this and other questions in a piece about Jean de Brunhof’s classic:

In the past few decades, a series of critics on the left, most notably the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, have indicted Babar in the course of a surprisingly resilient and hydra-headed argument about the uses of imagery and the subtleties of imperialist propaganda. Babar, such interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule. The animals that resist—the rhinoceroses—are defeated. The Europeanized elephants are, as in the colonial mechanism of indirect rule, then made trustees of the system, consuls for the colonial power. To be made French is to be made human and to be made superior. The straight lines and boulevards of Celesteville, the argument goes, are the sign of enslavement.

People who seem shocked by these interpretations might like to read up on Tintin.

I have been reading comments on a few Moroccan blogs about the Mohammed Erraji affair, and while the majority of people support Erraji’s right to free expression, I have to say I’m appalled at the way in which some of the commenters excuse the government and blame the victim. The angry responses range from attacks on the blogger for breaking the law (by, apparently, expressing his opinion) to attacks on his website for being trashy (it’s true it’s a tabloid, but if you want to read lies and omissions any day of the week, you could do no worse than the government rag).  It’s disheartening.

I was completely stunned by the news that David Foster Wallace had killed himself.  It’s so hard to make sense of any suicide, and especially so when the person is enormously talented, and loved by his family, his readers, his students, and his colleagues.  But neither success nor love can bring peace.  He seems to have been so tormented.  I am just so saddened by his passing.  There are many remembrances being posted all over the place. And Ed Champion has posted many writers’ reactions to the news.