Here's Russell Peters on being Indian:
All my life I've been identifying myself as an Indian man. I'm always like, I'm Indian. What are you? I'm Indian. Where you from? I'm Indian. What do you mean, where am I from? I'm Indian. And then I realised something. I was born and raised in Canada. There's nothing Indian about me! The only thing Indian about me are my parents and my skin tone. That's it! Culturally, I'm not Indian at all. And the only reason I know this is because last year I went to India to do some shows. And I thought I was Indian. And when we were flying over to India, I got this overwhelming Indian feeling. Inside of me I was like, I'm the most Indian man ever! I just thought I was so Indian, you know? We arrived in Bombay, I was like yelling at the flight attendant "Open the doors to this plane! Let me at my Indian people! Let me show those Indians what it's like to be Indian!" She opened up the doors to that plane, I turned Canadian so fast! I was like: "I am so... Did I step in shit just now?" When you arrive in India, the minute they open the doors to that plane, you get an overwhelming blast of shit smell right up your nose! It's almost like they hire someone to shit in front of every plane that lands! Quick, quick, here comes one. Shit, shit and go! Shit and go! Go! go! go! And if you're an Indian person out there, you're thinking to yourself, "That's not true, that's not true". Then screw you, you probably had a cold or landed in the wrong country! Because racially I'm an Indian man. Culturally, there are things that happen culturally, if you are not raised in that part of the world, you will find it unacceptable.
We had a yard sale once and the majority of people who came to check out our wares were Indian women, beautiful in their saris and gold bangles. They would pick up everything, inspecting and tutting and shaking their heads at the unfortunate quality, and then come and offer me half or less of the asking price, every one of them trying to look pathetic and saying, "Please understand, you understand." It was really getting on my nerves, because it felt so manipulative, and the worst was when a woman picked up a rather nice doll that was marked at 25 cents and she came and tried to put a dime in my hand, saying, "Please understand". I didn't understand and I didn't take her dime and we haven't had a yard sale since.
I have long been rather fascinated by Indian culture and enjoy picking up books set there. From novels like A Fine Balance, A Suitable Boy, The God Of Small Things, even Secret Daughter,Life Of Pi, The White Tiger and everything by Salman Rushdie, I've learned about the huge disparity between the very rich and the very poor, and it has been equally fascinating to see the recent rise of the middle class that's occurring in India. With this sketchy knowledge base, I can appreciate just what the Confidence Group's buyout offer meant to the residents of Vishram Society in Last Man In Tower. Everyone in the tower seemed to have enough to eat and they had the funds to send their children to good schools and most have servants and none of them needed to share their flats with multigenerational extended family members like in some of the other books I've read, but when they saw what they could potentially sell their homes for, the shot at a true middle class life style (scooters and eating at the mall and an apartment with a steady water supply) became more important to them than the friendships they had forged with their neighbours over many many years. In reaction to the holdouts, it all turns Lord Of The Flies. Aravind Adiga does an excellent job of altering the people ever so slightly over time so that you can understand how friends changed into enemies. I especially liked: when Mrs. Puri, while plotting to murder Masterji, notes what a bully he has become in holding up the sale.
Adiga wrote fully fleshed out characters and brought Mumbai to life; you could pretty much smell the shit. And he was masterful at demonstrating how impossible it must be to take a moral stand when everyone in authority, from the police to the courts to the government, are immoral and out to line their own pockets. And there were some lovely bits of writing that made me think:
Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.
A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.
When small people like us compromise, it is the same as when big people refuse to compromise. The world becomes a better place.
But despite the excellent writing and plot and pacing, there was something halting and stilted about Last Man In Tower that made it a slow read for me. This might be because the author is Indian and writing in a cadence that's foreign to me, like trying to translate the live tech support from "Kevin" when your computer is crashing, yet Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth are also Indian and I have no issue with them. Perhaps, like Russell Peters, I think I understand India and Indians until confronted with the real thing. Perhaps, when the lovely Indian ladies at my garage sale urged, "Please understand, you understand", I should have replied, "I want to,but maybe I don't".
