'The White Tiger': My two cents

I just finished reading ‘The White Tiger’, the first novel by Aravind Adiga. The novel had won Man Booker Prize in 2008 against a stiff competition from Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and 4 others.

Though the novel is a fast read and starts involving you once you have crossed the first 50 pages of the book, I must admit I was not impressed with the writing style. The novel is a series of letters written to the Chinese premiere with a continuous use of ‘Sir’. A similar style was in the book ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid where the narrator keeps addressing an unknown foreigner ‘Sir’ in almost every alternate sentence. I feel this is an unnecessary respect granted to a person of a different nationality considering him to be of superior race than people of South Asian descent.

Moving on to the second issue with the style, is what I see with most of the other Indian authors appealing to international audience – showing extreme poverty, people defecating in the open, children in torn clothes bathing in open black sewage, malnutrition, corrupt political and legal system etc…basically the so-called real exposed truth behind the modern India which we have been trying to project to the outside investor world. Now I am not saying it’s not true. Every Indian will admit that whatever these guys have written is absolutely true and can be seen in any slum prevalent in every city of India. But somehow it has become a habit of authors to exploit it. Why does books exposing such realties are the ones which win awards? It should also be noted that the author emigrated to Sydney in mid-90s and spent the rest of his life outside India. So the entire experience has been written by someone who has hardly lived in India.

This reminds me of Sanjeev Bhaskar and his BBC documentary on India’s call centers in which he shows some of the worst possible environments for the industry. Once again an extreme projection of India by someone who would have hardly witnessed the emergence of this industry…

The novel also has a lot of disparaging remarks about Muslims; yet somehow hasn’t invited any controversy… Sample this: “Have you noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslims? And yet all Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in Black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up?” Another one: “Full of things that the modern world forgot all about – rickshaws, old stone buildings and Muslims”.

Having said above, I don’t want to be only a critic of the book which I said earlier was a fast engrossing read. It has its own plus points. The book, I believe, has been successful in its objectives of creating awareness on the plight of servants in Indian households… I for once had never thought what a driver goes through sitting in an AC car waiting for his master whole day outside his office…a 24*7 house worker on seeing his employers enjoying the luxuries of life while he sleeps in either a kitchen or some sort of shabby servant quarters… when the kind of leverage the servants have on our daily lives, when they have the easiest access to the house wealth and its owners, still the proportion of crime committed by them is almost negligible… most of them are loyal to their masters throughout their lives… So all in all the book is a good and recommended read and leaves a sense of skepticism and suspicion in you...

Awards - Once again are they worth it?

in Nov 2008, I had written a blog on CMMI appraisals and whether they are worth it.
Let me extend a similar thought process to something most talked about these days – Satyam’s ‘asatyam’ saga - One of the biggest corporate frauds in Indian history.

Satyam’s books were internally audited and then externally audited by an auditing agency of repute (in fact considered among the Top 4). The corporate governance of Satyam was considered second best to Infosys to the extent that it was awarded the Golden Peacock Global Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance 2008 by World Council for Corporate Governance (WCFCG). It was also awarded Golden Peacock Award winner for Excellence in Corporate Governance in 2002. The irony being these are the same two years (2002 and 2008) between which Mr. Raju has admitted committing fraud and guess what ‘for corporate governance’ only.

So I am back to my original blog on CMMI… are these audits and governance awards really worth it or have they lost the purpose for which these were created. Audits are performed to ascertain the validity and reliability of information, and also provide an assessment of a company's internal processes & control. Wikipedia says: In financial accounting, an audit is an independent assessment of the fairness by which a company's financial statements are presented by its management. Please note the highlighted words in the definition.
Golden Peacock (IOD) website states: The Golden Peacock Awards are now considered as the holy grail of corporate excellence and its guidelines provide a checklist for improvement and self-assessment in areas of quality, Innovation, training, governance, environment management and corporate social responsibility. This is the only award, which has meticulously defined and transparent selection criteria and is determined by highly elaborate and independent assessment process. Again please note the last three words: independent assessment process.

So once again, we see things been done just for the sake of it losing the spirit and the purpose for which they were defined. If a company as large as Satyam can get away from not just internal audits but from external audits and can go ahead and win one of the most prestigious awards, do such things really serve purpose or are we just trying to get some extra mileage by having them listed against our name…

Do firms from now on still carry ‘Golden Peacock’ mention in their marketing materials? Would clients be satisfied when we say that our books are externally audited by the Big 4? We are slowly loosing the marketing gimmicks and who knows might get back to what works best ‘word of action’.
By the way, Satyam had also won: Award for Best IT practices, Entrepreneur of the Year award, Golden Peacock Award for Innovation and many many more in the controversial aspects…