Can’t help to expand a little bit about the precious stones I found in the White tiger.
One wisecracker for just for fun – a profound analysis of fashion development (page 225):
“The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they? See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do th rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor.”
One about the moral effects of literature (page 125).
“Just because drivers and cooks in Dehli are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn’t mean that they are all about to slit their masters necks. Of course, they’d like to. Of course a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses – and that’s why the governement if India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. You see, the murderer in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want te be like him – and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself (…)”
The latter mingles perfectly well with the idea of half baked ideas that govern our lifes, rather then rational notions that economists would like us to believe (the assumpion of rational behaviour being the fundaments of most economic theory and therefor for much of the policy our administrations tries to implement).