The Great Indian Rooster Coop:
What it is:
"….You'll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us.
Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop.
Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages…….. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.
Watch the roads in the evenings in Delhi; sooner or later you will see a man on a cycle-rickshaw, pedaling down the road, with a giant bed, or a table, tied to the cart that is attached to his cycle. Every day furniture is delivered to people's homes by this man - the deliveryman. A bed costs five thousand rupees, maybe six thousand…….he unloads the furniture for you, and you give him the money in cash - a fat wad of cash the size of a brick. He puts it into his pocket, or into his shirt, or into his underwear, and cycles back to his boss and hands it over without touching a single rupee of it! A year's salary, two year's salary, in his hands, and he never takes a rupee of it
……….He puts down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why? Because Indians are the world's most honest people like the prime ministers booklet will inform you? No. It is because 99.9 % of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.
………..Why doesn't that servant take the suitcase full of diamonds? He's no Gandhi, he's human, he's you and me. But he's in the Rooster Coop."
"The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy."
"Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way- to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse."
Why and how it works:
"Why does the Rooster Coop work? How does it trap so many millions of men and women so effectively?
Secondly, can a man break out of the coop? what if one day, for instance, a driver took his employers money and ran? What would his life be like?
The answer to the first question is that the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice…….the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop.
The answer to the second question is that only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed - hunted, beaten and burned alive by the masters- can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature."
Half-baked:
"The thing is, he probably has. .. what, two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy"—he pointed at me—"to characters like these. That's the whole tragedy of this country."
…..."The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian." That's what I ought to call my life's story.
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep—all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced.
But…...Fully formed fellows, after twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives.
Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay. "
The modern India as described by Adiga's Balram:
"Please understand Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of light and an India of darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India-the black river."
"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."
"These are three main diseases in this country: cholera, typhoid and election fever. The last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in."
"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 the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor."
"The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out and read. Instead of which , they're all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements."
A narrator like Balram Halwai is seldom seen, he sure is a complicated man. Balram teaches us the religion doesn't create virtue and money doesn't solve every problem.
"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."
"To break the law of his land-to turn bad news into good news- is the entrepreneur prerogative."
"I don't understand why other people don't buy chandeliers all the time, and put them everywhere. Free people don't know the value of freedom, that's the problem."
"Because the desire to be a servant had been bred into me: hammered into my skull, nail after nail, and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial poison are poured into Mother Ganga."
"When the work is done I kick them out of the office: no chitchat, no cups of coffee. A White Tiger keeps no friends. It's too dangerous."
