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Then something terrible happens, and Balram discovers that, to the family, he is still expendable. He begins to hope that his relationship with Ashok may lead him toward something better. And Balram, who has always quietly dreamed of something bigger, feels a tug of war inside himself. She tries to tell Balram to dream bigger than being a servant. She moved to the US when she was 12 and grew up in Queens, where her parents run a convenience store.
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Ashok isn’t abusive or cruel he just doesn’t think about Balram unless he needs to. Ashok, who grew up in India, is accustomed to treating Balram with a kind of benevolent dismissal, as an expendable servant. Singh Tejinder/Netflixīalram begs enough money from his grandmother to take driving lessons, then manages to claw his way into a job as the family’s second driver, mostly chauffeuring Ashok and Pinky. Adarsh Gourav and Priyanka Chopra in The White Tiger. Ashok has been living in the US, but he’s returned to India to join the family business, bringing his wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) along with him. He is Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), whose family keeps the government tax man off their back by paying off officials.
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One day, Balram (now a young man) spots the son of a wealthy family getting out of his fancy car, and suddenly realizes that all he wants in life is to work for this stylish, handsome, confident gentleman. And you’re likely to believe that’s all you can ever be. You have little access to education and opportunity. In his family, you are born, you live, and you die as a member of the servant class. He tells us that really, there are only two castes in India - the people who have things and the people who don’t. A teacher tells him one day that he’s the “white tiger” - according to lore, there is only one white tiger born in every generation, so this means Balram is special, unique, and destined for great things.īut that seems improbable. As he says: crime or politics.īalram (Adarsh Gourav) is a smart kid born to a very poor family in one of India’s lower castes. And it does so by zeroing in on one man’s life, the people he encounters, and his realizations about what it takes to vault the barrier. Like those films, The White Tiger takes a twofold approach to exploring inequality: It taps into the broader, well-established systems in India that make it extraordinarily difficult to move between social classes. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark But there’s been a crescendo in the past few years, spanning the globe from Senegal ( Atlantics) to Spain ( The Platform), Brazil ( Bacurau) to Korea ( Parasite), the United Kingdom ( Sorry We Missed You) to the United States ( Sorry to Bother You). Inequality and class conflicts are themes that have always echoed across world cinema. Later, he explains further: “For the poor, there are only two ways to get to the top: crime or politics.”īut then he hurls the all-important, innocent-sounding question: “Is it that way in your country too?”Īdapted from the Booker Prize-winning 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger is a funny and ferocious dip into India’s caste system and, more broadly, the cultural mechanisms that keep the poor in their place. “Don’t think for a second there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out,” he says. Speaking of the poverty into which he was born, our narrator Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav) pointedly rebuffs the earlier story for us, the movie’s viewers. Comparisons between Netflix’s The White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire were always going to be inevitable - poor boy in India makes good, becomes rich - but lest you miss the similarities, The White Tiger makes sure you can’t.