Aravind Adiga after winning the Booker. (AP)

London, Oct. 15: The Booker under his belt, Aravind Adiga now faces a daunting task.

“The first thing I’m going to do is find a bank where I can put it in,” Adiga joked, asked what he planned to do with the prize money of £50,000 (Rs 41.50 lakh).

The author of The White Tiger might have been joking but bank is not exactly a bankable word in these dark days of bankruptcies.

Had Adiga, the third to win a Booker for a debut novel, been in Bengal today, he would have had the benefit of free advice from Asim Dasgupta. “Keep your money in nationalised banks and postal savings. Don’t keep it in foreign banks in the wake of the global financial crisis,” the Bengal finance minister said while inaugurating a rural bank on the outskirts of Calcutta.

The jocular reference to banks apart, Adiga’s Tiger roared on a day young, upwardly mobile India was exposed to an unfamiliar — and unkind — face of “growth” with job losses staring some in the face.

The White Tiger, which shows “the dark side of India”, tells the tale of Balram Halwai, a rickshaw-puller’s son and the “White Tiger” who dreams of escaping his life as a teashop-worker-turned-chauffeur. When his chance arrives and his eyes are opened to the city of New Delhi, Balram is caught between his instinct to be a better son and his desire to better himself.

Adiga’s comments after the prize was announced were related to the theme of his book but the timing was such that they are certain to find resonance among many in India, forcing them to pause and ponder.

“There is a lot of triumphalist noise in India today. There is a sense of profound economic achievement and much of it is justified, but it is also important to listen to other noises,” he said.

“Something extraordinary is happening between the rich and the poor. Once, there was at least a common culture between rich and poor, but that has been eroded, and people have noted that,” Adiga added.

The Mumbai resident beat fellow Indian author Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies on an occasion that saw an Indian-origin author triumph for the fifth time.

The 33-year-old Adiga, who told The Telegraph he had been very upset at the way the novel was “trashed” in reviews in some Indian newspapers, is the second youngest author to win the prize after Ben Okri, who clinched the Man Booker in 1991, aged 32.

Adiga said he would like to “dedicate” the award to the people of New Delhi. He said “300 years ago, New Delhi was the most important city on earth and it could become so again”.

The Man Booker Prize announcement was made last night in London by a former Tory cabinet minister and chairman of the judges, Michael Portillo, who said: “My criteria were ‘Does it knock my socks off?’ — and this one did.... The others impressed me... this one knocked my socks off.”

He described The White Tiger as being in the tradition of Macbeth with a “delicious twist”.

Asked what winning the award meant to him, Adiga, who was born in Chennai and later moved to Mumbai, said: “It won’t change much, because I live in Mumbai, and I’m going back there day after tomorrow, and life in Mumbai has a way of reminding you that writers are not particularly important.”

“It won’t mean anything to my neighbours, they won’t know about this. Life will continue,” he said.

In a column in the Guardian recently, Adiga wrote of the travails of a bachelor in Mumbai.

“Making things worse is that I describe myself as a ‘writer’, a category that doesn’t mean anything to the landlords of Mumbai,” wrote the author, who began his career as a journalist.

Portillo said what set the book apart was its originality in showing “the dark side” of India. “The novel is in many ways perfect. It is quite difficult to find any structural flaws with it.”

The reader remained sympathetic with the hero despite him becoming corrupt, he added.

Portillo said there were more than two contenders for the prize on the shortlist but emphasised that the winner was “absolutely not a compromise”.

“There really was a decision. The judges were asked to express their satisfaction and they all did.”

He said he did not exercise a casting vote and the margin was “sufficient”.

One of the judges, he added, had commented at one point that they were trying to “compare a giraffe and a lion”.

Portillo said there was no “blood on the floor” during yesterday’s last-minute discussion but neither was it an easy meeting. “It was emotionally draining.”

Explaining the title of the novel, which he said was “partly angry” and “meant to be funny as well”, Adiga said the white tiger was a genetic mutation that happened once in a generation.

Asked whether a line in his book, which said the future belonged to the yellow man and the brown man, was possible, he replied: “It depends on what happens. It’s certainly something that’s possible.”