Thought-provoking is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit but I really can't quite get around "The White Tiger" any other way. Having little personal knowledge of India at all, let alone the political and social aspects of the village life described by Balram, I am left to think over my life (middle class American) and comparisons with other settings described by colonial and post-colonial authors. What captivated me initially was the conceit Adiga used for the plot construction - the idea that a self-educated/self-made man personally e-mailing a foreign head-of-state with insights as to the cultural and societal make-up of rural India caught my attention right away. Adiga gave Balram a very glib writing style, one I was surprised to see given Balram's severely shortened formal education; having just finished "Trainspotting" - a novel written almost entirely in dialect - I would have expected Balram's use of the English language to be choppier or have some mistakes here and there. The smooth style did not take away from my enjoyment of Adiga's novel, though, and this was a very quick read.