At one point Balram asks the premier why he thinks servants are so loyal to their masters. Why don't they demand a cut or threaten them with the police, or at the very least stand up to the masters who they outnumber by at least a thousand to one? Balram calls it the Rooster Coop syndrome. In the markets in New Delhi, hens and roosters are stuffed into wire cages where they spend their days pecking and shitting on each other fighting just to breathe. According to Balram, it's the same for the poor of India. They are so busy fighting among each other for the chance to breathe that they will never be able to escape their cages.

The threat of violence against their families if they misbehave is a factor as well. Balram recounts how a servant of one of the landlords in his home village did something wrong, and the landlord had his entire family killed in retaliation. Balram says it would take a unique individual, a White Tiger even, to be depraved enough to risk the lives of his entire family to steal the seven hundred thousand rupees his employer is carrying in a red leather bag to bribe a politician.

In The White Tiger we watch Balram suffer humiliation after humiliation and is expected to take it. His employer's wife gets drunk one night and forces Balram to let her drive and she kills a child. They make him sign a confession saying he was driving just in case the police decide to press charges. It's taken as matter of course that, as their servant, he would only be too glad to go to jail for them. After all, you can't really expect them to go to jail, now can you?

Balram's letter to the premier of China is like the confession of a Catholic penitent to his priest, save for one detail. He's not seeking absolution for any crimes he has committed; he's just using himself as an example to let the premier know the facts of life in modern day India. Bribery and corruption are what grease the wheels of the great economic miracle of India, wheels that are still being turned by slave labour. Underneath the statues of Gandhi and behind the pictures of the beautiful temples is corruption so ingrained that it's taken for granted as being the way things are and always will be.