Do you really think that The White Tiger was better than A Case of Exploding Mangoes?

Well I finished it, which is more than I can say for A Case Of Exploding Mangoes. A hundred pages in and I gave up - wasn’t doing anything for me.

Sea Of Poppies, on the other hand, I’ve yet to read.

What made you choose to write an epistolary novel? What makes it work as a vehicle for this particular story?

This isn’t an epistolary novel: there are no real letters involved. The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life.

Like the letters in John Berger’s From A To X, of course there’s no real letters involved: it’s a fiction. But if the author intended that the letters were not created by Balram in The White Tiger then that’s a failure to communicate. Either way, tangible letters or not in the fiction, it’s an epistolary novel.

I guess that is what the author intended to acheive. How else do you expect a man to react who kills his master and it changes his life for good. A man is kept in a prison of circumstances where he washes his master’s feet with hot water, even after having been told he has take on murder charges for his master’s wife’s drunken madness. He is bound to be happy he was able to murder and take the money. It is an aceivement. It is like of some of us think that we should break the shambles of this mundane life and become an author, or a social worker, etc. Those are luxuries of those who feel the freedom in their lives. So much of the have-nots around us have no idea what you mean by freedom. You can not even begin to understand the meaning when you have to think about the next day’s meal if you are thrown out of a job. Living on the edge. We should all be thankful that our drivers can not read this. This is, almost, like the Marxist call - “Poors of the world, unite. You have all the riches to loot!” Beware of this author. This was only his first. Without the best of executions, he has been able to create a potential dynamite. Am sure he is on a nuclear mission within this decade.