As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. Much like Parasite, The White Tiger describes a specific society, but the issues that arise are universal.Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. The White Tiger is an absorbing and brutally cynical story about the inequality of class structures in society, comparable to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.
What becomes clear to Balram is that they may condemn the way he is treated by The Stork, professing to him how unfair the system is, but in the end, they’ll throw him under the bus when it suits them, because they believe themselves to be better than him. The film, told through Balram’s perspective, keeps emphasizing Ashok’s and Pinky’s hypocrisy, one moment behaving in a friendly manner towards him, and then the next minute reprimanding him like a child. And yet, the sense of privilege prevails. Pinky, in fact, tells Balram of her family’s working-class background in the U.S.
The caste system may have existed for thousands of years, but in The White Tiger, Ashok and his wife Pinky have lived outside of this tradition, both U.S.
It isn’t just the wealthy that the film, through Balram’s character, is attacking, but the sense of entitled privilege that comes with it.
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