Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, both
accommodates and provokes a variety of voices and discourses, evoking and dealing with
India’s past, present, and future, thus highlighting its author’s dialogic vision. Although
postcolonial and posthumanist approaches are worth exploring at length in this very
challenging text, the current starts from the novel’s initial “conversation” with a
controversial non-fiction book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and the theory of
the ten flatteners that reshape globalization, with Bangalore as the then (2006) neoliberal
hub of the world. Using the patterns of the frame narrative of the Arabian Nights and of the
European epistolary novel, the text under investigation dramatizes and transfigures the
dark side of neoliberalism by means of the imaginary conversation between a murderer
turned successful entrepreneur and the leader of the world’s most prominent rising
economic tiger.