Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're doing
something a little different. Usually we look
at a specific concept or, you know, a historical
event, but today we're looking at a person. Right,
a person who really embodies this collision of
two completely different worlds. Yeah, we're
talking about Eravinda Diga. And it's a name
that carries a lot of weight in literary circles,
obviously, but the reason we picked him for a
Deep Dive isn't just because he wrote... one
incredibly famous book no it's because of the
road he took to get there it's just it's not
the typical path yeah that's the hook for me
because if you look at the typical sort of literary
sensation origin story it usually involves an
mfa program right maybe some poetry published
in obscure journals a lot of brooding and coffee
shops exactly adiga's path was well messier or
Maybe cleaner is the word, but in like a corporate
sense. That's a good way to put it. This is a
man who spent his days analyzing the stock market.
It's unbelievable. He was wading through financial
reports, tracking global capital flows, interviewing
CEOs. And then he just turns around and writes
a novel that wins the Man Booker Prize on his
very first try. It's the ultimate aha moment.
I mean, just think about the headspace difference
there. Yeah. In the morning. You're writing for
Money magazine, trying to explain why a particular
tech stock is overvalued. And then in the evening,
you're channeling the voice of a murderer from
the back streets of Delhi. It creates this fascinating
tension in his work. You know, you have the rigid
discipline of facts and numbers colliding with
this wild, untamed freedom of fiction. And that's
really our mission today. We aren't just doing
a biography. No, this is an unpacking. Yeah,
we want to unpack how a financial journalist
used what he called his return ticket to India
to expose the gritty underbelly of its class
system in a way that, frankly, no one else was
really doing at that time. And we have a lot
to get through. We've got stacks of biographical
data. We've got his journalism archives. We've
got all the critical reception of his novels.
It's a mountain of material. It is. We're going
to trace his journey. from South India all the
way to Australia. then to the Ivy League, and
finally back to the beautiful chaos of New Delhi.
And we absolutely cannot forget the detour where
he interviewed Donald Trump. Oh, we are definitely
spending time on that. That is my favorite nugget
in this whole research pile. It feels like a
glitch in the simulation. It really does. But
beyond the trivia, we need to analyze the white
tiger, of course, but also his later work. He's
written about cricket, about real estate, about
undocumented immigrants in Australia. He's got
so much to say. about who gets to succeed in
the modern world. And who gets left behind. So
let's stop looking at the map and actually start
the drive. If we want to figure out how a guy
ends up bridging the gap between Wall Street
reporting and literary fiction, we can't just
look at his resume. No, you have to go back to
the beginning. We have to look at his roots.
And honestly, his start in life was, well, it
wasn't exactly the slumdog narrative you might
expect given his subject matter. No, not at all.
And that's a crucial distinction to make right
up front. Aravind Adhika was born on October
23, 1974. In Madras, which is now Chennai, of
course. Right. But his family roots are really
in Mangalore, in the state of Karnataka. OK,
but let's dig into the family tree for a second,
because this is where that whole struggling artist
narrative just completely falls apart. It completely
evaporates. He comes from a very established,
very prestigious lineage. His paternal grandfather,
Kayserian Ariana Adiga, wasn't just, you know,
a local businessman. He was the chairman of Karnataka
Bank. OK, so let's just pause on that. We're
talking about serious financial literacy. at
the dinner table. Oh, for sure. If your grandfather
runs a bank, you grow up understanding what interest
rates do to people. You understand capital. You
understand leverage. It's in the water you drink.
Precisely. And then on the other side of the
family, his maternal great -grandfather, Yura
Marau, was a popular medical practitioner and
a really significant politician in Madras. So
on both sides, you have this DNA of public service,
finance, and professional success. Right. He
grew up in an environment where high achievement
wasn't just encouraged. It was the baseline.
It was the absolute expectation. It sets the
stage for incredibly high expectations. He grew
up in Mangalore, attending Canara High School
and then St. Aloysius College. So up until about
1990. He's deeply embedded in the Indian educational
system. Right. And for those who aren't familiar,
St. Aloysius is a Jesuit institution. So it's
rigorous. It's very rigorous. It values disciplines,
intellectualism. It's a very serious place. But
then everything changes. The family emigrates.
They move down under to Sydney, Australia. And
this is the first major pivot point in his life.
He goes from Mangalore, India to Sydney, Australia,
and he enrolls in a school called James Roos
Agricultural High School. OK, wait, Agricultural
High School. That sounds like he's out learning
to drive tractors or shear sheep or something.
Is that what he was doing? See, that's what the
name suggests. But James Roos is actually legendary
in Australia for a completely different reason.
It is consistently the highest performing academic
school in all of New South Wales. It is an absolute
academic pressure cooker. So it's not about farming.
It's about absolutely crushing the equivalent
of the SATs. Exactly. It's a selective public
school. It's incredibly, incredibly competitive.
So just try to imagine this for a second. Yeah.
You're a teenage immigrant. You've just landed
in a brand new country, and you are thrown into
the most intellectually competitive environment
in the entire state. That experience of being
the outsider who has to not just keep up but
outperform the insiders? That had to have shaped
his work ethic. It must have. The pressure would
be immense. It sounds exhausting, honestly. But
clearly he thrived on it. Because the academic
journey didn't stop in Sydney. He just keeps
leveling up. From Sydney, he heads to New York
City. To Columbia University. He enters the Ivy
League to study English literature. And he didn't
just scrape by. He graduated as the salutatorian
of the class of 1997. Salutatorian at Columbia.
That is a massive, massive achievement. But I
want to dig into who he was learning from because
the names here really matter. I saw that he studied
under Simon Summa. Yes, the historian Simon Stamma.
No, when I think of historians, I usually think
of, you know, dusty academics just listing dates
and battles. But Shumma is, he's different, isn't
he? he's very different simon stama is a narrator
he's a storyteller first and foremost if you
read his book citizens which is about the french
revolution he treats history like a character
-driven drama right he focuses on the sensory
details the blood the noise the smells the individual
voices he makes it feel alive so if you're a
young writer studying under a guy like shama
you're learning that history isn't just about
forces and trends it's about people exactly you
learn that to make people care about the macro,
the big picture. You have to obsess over the
micro. The individual story. The individual story.
I think you can draw a direct line from Shoma's
teaching to... Adiga's writing style. When Adiga
writes The White Tiger, he isn't giving you a
dry sociological paper on poverty in India. No,
not at all. He's giving you a voice. He's giving
you the spit and the grit and the anger. And
that's the Skama influence, that realization
that the big picture is best understood through
the lens of a single, compelling, and maybe even
unreliable voice. And just when you think the
resume can't get any more elite, he crosses the
Atlantic again. He goes to Oxford. Magdalene
College specifically. And there, his tutor was
Hermione Lee. Who is a legend in her own right.
I mean, she's the definitive biographer of Virginia
Woolf and Edith Wharton. Right. So now he's learning
from the master of biography. He's learning how
to deconstruct a life, how to look at the psychological
motivations of the subject, how to find the narrative
thread in a person's existence. So let's just
pause and look at this roadmap again. Mangler
to Sydney. Sydney to Columbia. Columbia to Oxford.
It is a hyper -elite, thoroughly Western education.
And I think this is where the critical analysis
really has to come in. You have a man who has
been groomed in the halls of the Ivy League in
Oxford, studying under world -class historians
and biographers. But, and this is the huge twist
in the story, he eventually becomes famous for
writing about the absolute grittiest street -level
realities of India. It feels like a contradiction,
doesn't it? It seems like one, but I'd argue
it's actually his superpower. How so? It creates
this unique outsider insider perspective. He
has the intellectual tools of Western academia,
you know, critical theory, narrative structure,
historical context. But he applies them to the
visceral lived reality of his homeland. So he's
not just observing, he's diagnosing. He's got
the clinical tools to analyze the patient. That's
a perfect way to put it. He can see the systems
at play because he has stepped outside of them.
If he had never left India, never gone to Sydney
or New York, he might have been too close to
the picture to see the frame. Yeah, that makes
sense. His education gave him the zoom lens.
He can zoom all the way out to the global economic
view, thanks to that education. But then he can
zoom all the way back in to a tea shop on a street
corner in Delhi. And that ability to zoom out
was sharpened by his next career move, which
for me is the most interesting part of his whole
resume. I agree. We need to talk about the financial
journalist's face. Because he didn't leave Oxford
and immediately start writing novels in some
dusty garret. He got a job. He did. He went right
into the belly of the beast. He started as an
intern at the Financial Times. The FT. The pink
paper. That is serious, serious business news.
It is. And then he moved on to writing pieces
for Money and Time magazines. And we need to
be really clear about what his beat was here.
Yeah. This wasn't arts reporting. He wasn't reviewing
plays or interviewing poets. No, he was covering
the stock market and investment. Hard finance.
He was looking at numbers, at trends, at corporate
movements, at debt to equity ratios. I feel like
we breezed past that. But let's stop and think
about what that actually does to your brain as
a writer. OK. When you are a beat reporter for
Money magazine. You are not writing poetry. You
are looking at balance sheets. You are looking
at leverage. You are tracing exactly how a rupee
or a dollar moves from a laborer's pocket to
a CEO's offshore account. That's a brilliant
point. It creates a very specific kind of discipline.
In fiction, we often talk about world building.
Right. Usually we mean that in the context of
like fantasy or sci -fi inventing magic systems
or alien planets. But for Adiga, world building
was about economic systems. Right. He didn't
have to guess how corruption works. No. He knew
exactly how the bribery structure worked in the
transportation industry because he likely reported
on the logistics sector. He knew how real estate
developers leveraged debt to build skyscrapers.
He brings a forensic accountant's eye to the
novel. That's it. He understands that money is
the blood of the story. If you follow the money,
you find the plot every time. Which brings us
to the moment where his journalism career collided
with pop culture history in a way that feels
almost scripted. It's 2003. He's a financial
journalist. And he gets an assignment to interview
a certain real estate developer in New York City.
Future U .S. President Donald Trump. Let's just
sit with that image for a second. You have Erivan
Adig Oxford, educated. Quiet, literary, probably
carrying a copy of Flaubert in his bag. Right.
And he's sitting across from Donald Trump at
Trump Tower. It is a clash of civilizations,
isn't it? It really is. I mean, 2003 Trump is
pre the apprentice Trump. Yeah. Or maybe just
on the cusp of it. He's the brash New York real
estate mogul. That's the brand. Yeah. And Arriga
is there to ask him about what? Interest rates?
occupancy levels in his buildings? Probably the
branding of his buildings, his debt structures,
how he licensed his name. But imagine what Adiga
is observing. Oh, yeah. He's watching a man who
constructs his own reality through sheer force
of will and ego. That's a good point. Do you
think that interaction influenced the villains
in his novels later on? I think it has to have.
Because when you read The White Tiger or Last
Man in Tower, the rich people aren't just rich.
They have this... This delusional self -confidence,
this belief that the rules don't apply to them.
I think it absolutely played a role. Adiga saw
firsthand how power operates in a room. He saw
that power isn't always about being the smartest
person. Sometimes it's about being the loudest.
Yeah. It's about projecting success until it
becomes real. That is a very specific type of
psychology that absolutely shows up again and
again in his characters. It's a great cocktail
party fact that he interviewed Trump. But deep
down, I think it was field research for understanding
the modern oligarch. Absolutely. But 2003 wasn't
just the year of Trump for him. It was also a
massive turning point geographically. Right.
He makes the decision to leave the comfort and,
you know, the career track of New York. He moves
to New Delhi. He accepts the position of South
Asia correspondent for Time magazine. That is
a massive job. South Asia correspondent, you
aren't just covering a city or even a country.
You are covering a huge, diverse, volatile region.
Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal.
It's a massive beat. And he had a really interesting
reflection on this later. In a 2017 interview,
he said something like, being a journalist afforded
me a path to go back to India. Afforded me a
path. That's interesting phrasing, isn't it?
It is. It implies he needed a reason. He couldn't
just go back and, you know, hang out. Well, think
about the pressure of the immigrant family. You've
gone to Columbia and Oxford. Your family has
invested everything in this elite Western education.
You can't just move back to your parents' house
to find yourself. Exactly. You need a career.
You need a reason. Journalism was the vehicle.
But I think you're right. It was also a Trojan
horse. Yeah. It allowed him to reenter India
not as a tourist and not just as a returning
son, but as an investigator with a press pass.
And crucially, it forced him to travel. If he
had become a professor in Delhi, for instance,
he would have stayed on campus. But as a time
correspondent. Where are you going? Everywhere.
You're going to political rallies in Uttar Pradesh.
You're going to disaster zones after an earthquake.
You're meeting politicians, warlords, tech CEOs,
and rickshaw drivers, sometimes all on the same
day. You are forced to see the seams of the society,
the places where it's all stitched together and
where it's fallen apart. He did that for three
intense years, a high -pressure, high -stakes
gig. And then he pivoted again. He became a freelancer
and moved to Mumbai. And that is when the dam
broke. That's when all that accumulated data,
all those interviews, all that travel, it started
to transmute into fiction. Which leads us perfectly
into the main event. Section 3. The White Higer
Phenomenon. The debut that changed everything
for him. So just to set the timelines for everyone.
He resigns from time. He's living in Mumbai.
And he starts writing. The book comes out in
March 2008. And let's talk about the book itself
for a second for listeners who might not have
read it. The White Tiger is an epistolary novel.
Right. It's written as a series of letters. From
this character, Balram Helway, who is a village
boy who becomes a chauffeur in Delhi. And he's
writing these letters to the premier of China.
Which is just an absurd and brilliant premise.
Totally. The premier of China is visiting India
to learn about entrepreneurship. So Balram decides
to write to him and tell him the real story of
how you succeed in modern India. And the story
isn't work hard and play by the rule. Far from
it. It's a confession. Ballroom confesses pretty
early on to murdering his employer to steal his
money and escape poverty. It's a story about
what he calls the rooster coop. The rooster coop.
We have to explain that analogy because it is
the absolute central metaphor of the entire book.
It is. Adiga, through Balram, describes the Indian
underclass as roosters in a coop at a market.
They can smell the blood of the roosters next
to them being slaughtered. They can see the butcher's
knife. They know what's coming. They know exactly
what's coming, but they don't rebel. They don't
even try to escape. Why? Because the system of
servitude is so deeply ingrained, so totalizing,
that they can't imagine a world outside the coop.
And Balram is the white tiger. This rare creature
that is born only once in a generation who is
willing to break out of the coop. Even if it
means becoming a monster to do it. Exactly. And
that voice, cynical, funny, brutal, unsparing,
it just caught fire. The book won the 2008 Man
Booker Prize. Well, it's the Oscars of literature
for the Commonwealth countries. It changes your
life overnight. It's a career maker. It is. And
he was the fourth Indian -born author to win,
which put him in some very rarefied company.
He was following Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy,
and Kiran Desai. That is heavy -hitting company.
I mean, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Roy's
God of Small Things, these are foundational pillars
of modern Indian English literature. But Adigo's
doing something really different. Rushdie's work
is full of magical realism. Roy's is very lyrical,
almost poetic in its prose. Adigo was punk rock.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. He was angry.
He was fast. He was satirical and vicious. And
the commercial success was just instant. It was
huge. The Indian hardcover edition alone sold
over 200 ,000 copies. That is a staggering number
for a literary hardcover in any country, let
alone India at the time. It just speaks to how
much the book resonated with people. But I want
to talk at the critical reception. the comparisons
that were made. USA Today called it one of the
most powerful books I've read in decades. But
then they, and a lot of other critics, compared
it to two very specific American books. Richard
Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man. And those are not names you throw around
lightly. That's a huge claim. No. So let's break
that down because it's important. For listeners
who haven't read Ellison since, you know, high
school or college, Invisible Man isn't a sci
-fi book. No, it's not H .G. Wells. Invisible
Man, published back in 1952, is about a black
man in America who comes to realize that he is
invisible simply because white society refuses
to see him as a full human being. Right. He's
looked through, not at. And Attica is tapping
into that exact same vein of social commentary.
Perfectly. Ballroom, the driver, is invisible
to his masters. They have conversations about
their corrupt business deals, their affairs,
their family secrets, right in front of him in
the back of the car. Because to them, he isn't
a person. He's just part of the upholstery. He's
a function. He's the guy who drives the car.
What about Native Son? Native Son is about a
character named Bigger Thomas, a poor black man
in 1930s Chicago who accidentally kills a white
woman. It's a brutal book. It is. But the novel's
core argument is that Bigger Thomas was created
by his environment. The systemic oppression,
the lack of opportunity, the constant fear and
racism, it twisted him into a killer. Adiga is
making the exact same argument for Balram. Balram
isn't born a murderer. No, the rooster coop creates
him. Society gives him only one brutal way out.
So by comparing Adiga to Wright and Ellison.
The critics are basically saying that Adiga did
for class in India what those authors did for
race in America. Exactly. He gave a literary
voice to the invisible underclass. He exposed
the structural violence of the system. He showed
that the whole India shining narrative. Yeah,
the idea of India as this booming tech superpower.
Was built on the backs of millions of invisible
men and women trapped in that coop. The Washington
Post called it a blistering description of the
inner workings of India's corrupt upper class.
But they also called it funny. And I think that's
key. Oh, it's crucial. It's not a depressing,
miserable trudge. Yeah. It's hilarious in a really
dark way. It's almost like, have you ever watched
the show Succession? Oh, totally. Love that show.
It has that same vibe where the characters are
objectively monstrous, awful people, but you
can't stop laughing at how absurd their world
is, how petty their concerns are. That is a perfect
comparison. It's the absurdity of excess on one
side versus the absurdity of deprivation on the
other. You laugh so you don't scream. Precisely.
And that cinematic quality, that sharp, witty
dialogue is probably why it adapted so well to
the screen. It was made into a feature film for
Netflix in 2021. Yes. starring Adarsh Gaurav
and Priyanka Chopra. It was really well done
and it brought the story to a whole new generation
of people who might not have read the book. It
did. But as with any massive sudden success,
there was turbulence. We have to touch on Section
4, controversy and the business of writing. Because
with great fame comes, well, legal trouble sometimes.
The Booker effect isn't all champagne and parties.
Not at all. Shortly after the win, reports started
to surface alleging that Adiga had sacked the
agent who had secured his original... And Adiga
denied this, right? He did. He denied the claim.
And honestly, these kinds of disputes happen
all the time in publishing. But the reason it
made headlines was the timing. Of course. When
there is suddenly a massive prize purse and huge
international royalties on the table, relationships
get tested. The stakes get incredibly high overnight.
It's a reality check. It reminds us that writing,
especially at that level, is also a business.
It's an industry. And Adiga, having been a financial
journalist, probably understood that better than
most authors would. I'm sure he did. Yeah. But
he didn't let the noise or the business side
of things stop his output. And this is where
I think the deep dive gets really interesting.
I agree. Because most people know the white tiger.
Fewer people know what came next. Let's move
to section five, the expanded bibliography. Because
he definitely did not just disappear. No. In
fact, his second book, Between the Assassinations,
came out almost immediately after the debut,
also in 2008. Structurally, it's a fascinating
follow -up. It's a collection of interconnected
short stories, not a novel. Right. And it's set
in a fictional coastal town in South India called
Kidder. Yes. And it was actually written before
The White Pager. but published after, which is
interesting. It really cemented his voice. It
showed he wasn't a one -hit wonder. He had this
whole world inside him that he wanted to explore.
It's like a mosaic of a town, isn't it? It covers
everyone from the beggars to the busboys to the
rich housewives. It does. And then came his proper
follow -up novel, Last Man in Tower, in 2011.
This is a personal favorite of mine. It's about
real estate in Mumbai. Which is a complete blood
sport. It is. The plot is so simple but so effective.
A developer wants to buy out an old, crumbling
apartment building to build a luxury high -rise.
Standard story in Mumbai. Right. Everyone agrees
to sell and take the money, except for one person.
A retired school teacher who's lived there his
whole life. He refuses to move. So it's high
noon in a crumbling apartment block. Exactly.
It's a brilliant novel about greed. It asks this
fundamental question. What happens to a community
when a huge pile of money is suddenly dropped
in the middle of it? The neighbors turn on each
other. Instantly. It's a brilliant dissection
of the pressures on the middle class. And then
a few years later, we have Selection Day, which
was published in 2016. Now, if you know anything
about India, you know you can't write about its
society without, at some point, writing about
cricket. It's unavoidable. And Selection Day.
Just the title stresses me out. It should. On
the surface, it's a novel about two brothers
who are groomed by their obsessive, tyrannical
father to become cricket stars. So it's the classic
sports dad trope. But taken to an incredible
extreme. Adiga uses the obsession with cricket
in Mumbai to dissect the relationship between
fathers and sons and the crushing weight of expectation.
It's more than just a game. Oh, much more. See,
in India, cricket isn't just a sport for the
working class. It's like a lottery ticket. It's
the escape hatch. It is one of the few sanctioned,
celebrated escape routes from poverty. If you
make the national team, you save your entire
family for generations. Adiga just masterfully
explores the psychological toll of being that
golden ticket child. It's really about the commodification
of talent. And then his most recent major work,
Amnesty, published in 2020. This is where I think
the narrative arc of his entire career really
comes full circle. It absolutely does. Because
where is it set? We are back in Australia. Sydney,
to be precise. The protagonist, Danny, is a Sri
Lankan immigrant. But here is the catch. He's
undocumented. He has overstayed a student visa
and is living illegally. So in The White Tiger,
the protagonist was an outsider because of his
caste and his class. In Amnesty, the protagonist
is an outsider because of his legal status. Precisely.
The new caste system. Danny is cleaning houses
for cash, living in the shadows. He witnesses
a murder. And now he has this impossible dilemma.
If he goes to the police to report the murder.
He exposes himself and gets deported immediately.
But if he says nothing, a killer walks free.
That is a classic Hitchcockian setup, a moral
thriller. It is pure tension. But again, Adiga
is using the thriller plot to look at the system.
He's looking at the gig economy of citizenship.
He's asking, who gets to be a litigant? Who gets
to have rights? Who is visible and who is invisible
in a wealthy Western city? And it was very well
received. It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin
Award, which is the big Australian literary prize.
So think about that for a second. He's won the
Booker in the UK and Commonwealth Sphere, and
then he shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in
the Australian Sphere. He really is a global
literary citizen. He spans these worlds effortlessly.
He does, which is a good transition to our last
section here, Section 6, Journalism, Writings,
and Style. Yeah, because even while he was writing
these incredible novels, he kept his hand in
the journalism game. And the titles of his articles
alone tell you a lot about his worldview. They
do. He is not a writer who pulls his punches.
Just look at this list. An article for Time in
2008 called The Death of the Indian Dream. Oof.
That is bleak. Yeah. And provocative. Then you
have an opinion piece in The Guardian called
Bachelor Bigotry, and another one in the Sunday
Times just called Smack. These aren't exactly,
you know, travel and leisure pieces about the
beauty of the Taj Mahal. Not at all. The death
of the Indian dream. That is such a provocative
statement. It aligns perfectly with the themes
of The White Tiger. He is actively challenging
the official narrative. Right. At that time,
the world was obsessed with India shining. The
I .T. boom. Yeah. The economic growth. The new
billionaires. And Adiga was the guy standing
in the back of the room raising his hand and
saying, hey, that's great. But have you looked
at the sewage system? Have you looked at the
inequality? Have you looked at what is actually
happening on the ground for 99 percent of the
population? It's that journalist's instinct again.
Digging for the truth. Even if it's ugly. Especially
if it's ugly. He seems to believe that true patriotism
isn't blindly praising your country. It's holding
a mirror up to its flaws so it can be better.
So we have covered a massive amount of ground
here. From the banking halls of Mangalore, to
the academic treasure cooker of James Roos, to
that bizarre interview with Trump, to the Booker
Prize. Let's try to synthesize this. What are
the big takeaways? OK, well, first, I think Adiga
is a product of three continents, Asia, Australia,
North America, and an incredibly elite education.
Columbia, Oxford. He is not a local writer. He
is a global intellectual. Right. He has the tools
to deconstruct systems because he has seen how
they work from the very top down. Second takeaway
for me is that he used financial journalism as
a Trojan horse. I love that phrase. It allowed
him to reenter India, to really understand its
economic disparities, and to gather the raw material
for his fiction. He learned that money is always
the story. And third, his work consistently and
deservedly draws comparisons to the heavyweights
of social literature. We're talking Ellison,
we're talking Richard Wright. He is writing about
the big issues, class, oppression, and the fundamental
struggle for human dignity. He is giving voice
to the invisible. Which brings us to our final
provocative thought for the day. Okay. If you
look at his trajectory, Adiga moved from analyzing
stock markets as a journalist to analyzing the
death of the Indian dream in his fiction. Right.
The focus was very much on India. But then, in
2020, with Amnesty, he shifted his focus. He's
now writing about undocumented immigrants in
Australia. So if his fiction is an extension
of his journalism, as we've been arguing. Exactly.
What does that shift tell us about where he's
looking now? Is he suggesting that the class
war that he wrote about so powerfully in India
has now gone global? That's a chilling thought.
Is he telling us that the next great crisis of
conscience isn't just about poverty in the developing
world, but about movement, about migration? about
who has the right to be where. And that the border
between the haves and the have -nots is becoming
a literal physical border between nations. If
Aravinda Diga is the canary in the coal mine
for global social issues, we should probably
be paying very close attention to where he flies
next. We certainly should. That's all the time
we have for this deep jive. Thanks for listening,
and we'll catch you on the next one.