I’ve been waiting over 15 years to adapt and direct “The White Tiger.” In a folder on my laptop titled, “aravind’s writings,” I discover early drafts dating back to 2004, four years before the novel was published. Even in rough form, it was an amazingly gripping story with vibrant, sarcastic, subversive writing. I told Aravind Adiga, the book’s author, I was confident that someone would publish his debut novel.
Aravind is one of my closest friends since our undergraduate days at Columbia University. We connected as outsiders on a predominantly white campus (I’m Iranian American, Aravind is Indian). I wanted to be a filmmaker and he a novelist.