The White Tiger: a quintessential India book

The street and residents who live around Asha, the place I volunteered.

I read “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga the other day. This is considered the book about India, the one the guidebooks tell you to read for insight. Of course I didn’t read it before going over, or even while I was there.

Anyway, I wish I’d read it first, because there are also things in the book that would have soothed me on those days when Delhi was driving me mad. This passage had me laughing out loud, and reminded me of the time I got lost looking for a nearby restaurant. 

More local residents

“The truth is that Delhi is a crazy city. See, the rich people live in big housing colonies like Defence Colony or Greater Kailash or Vasant Kunj, and inside their colonies the houses have numbers and letters, but this numbering and lettering system follows no known system of logic. For instance, in the English alphabet, A is next to B, which everyone knows, even people like me who don’t know English. But in a colony, one house is called A 231, and then the next is F 378. So one time Pinky Madam wanted me to take her to Greater Kailash E 231. I tracked down the houses to E 200, and just when I thought we were almost there, E Block vanished completely. The next house was S something.”

The timing's the thing

I start a great new job tomorrow, and I wouldn't have gotten it if I hadn’t gone to India.

No, really. Here’s my recent life timeline: in November, I was fired from a job I hated. I decided to finally follow through on a long-held dream to go to India. I arrived on New Year’s Eve and loved being there so much, I stayed…and stayed…stayed. Despite my father’s claim that I promised to come home after one month (I recall no such promise), I didn't return to the States until mid-May.

A little over a week later, I got a temporary contract job to help with Olympics coverage at a fun tech company that’s kind of hard to get in with (I’ve applied to them twice before and gotten no response). I had a blast at the job and when it ended, the company—which likes to pull from its contractor pool—offered me a long-term contract position, where I'll be doing something I'm actually interested in (it involves following current events, which I already do hours every day for fun).