Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
Aravind AdigaApparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you donโt have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, โโdoesโโ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneursโ"we" entrepreneursโhave set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.
Aravind AdigaColumbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
Aravind AdigaNever before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percentโas strong, as talented, as inteligent in every wayโto 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.
Aravind AdigaGo to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.
Aravind Adiga