Paper cuts: The Rooster Coop

Adiga's rooster coop (from White Tiger) reminds me of Hamid's air conditioning (from Moth Smoke). But Adiga has won a Booker, so it's not just the coop. Or the accompanying poop. I like how his writing flows effortlessly and without taking itself too seriously. It's endearingly believable, despite the caricaturing and parodies. 

 "When you get here, you'll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us.

 Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop.

 Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench - the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.

 The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

 ...

 Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you?

 No. It's because 99.9% of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those guys in the poultry market.

 The Rooster Coop doesn't always work with minuscule sums of money. Don't test your chauffeur with a rupee coin or two - he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars in front of a servant and he won't touch a penny of it... He's no Gandhi, he's human, he's you and me. But he's in the Rooster Coop.

 ...

 Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse."