From Rooster to White Tiger: The Struggle For Change

Seeking Freedom from Oppression

In the 2021 Indian-based American movie White Tiger, the lead character, Balram, says,

“The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers…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.”

The Rooster Coop is a metaphor for describing how oppressed the poor are in India. The caged roosters at the market watch each other get slaughtered but can’t do anything about it.

Similarly, he believes that India’s poor are so crushed by the wealthy and powerful that they behave in the same way as the rooster. They are helpless, paralysed by hopelessness. He even argues that the poor actively stop each other from escaping, or worse, are enslaved by a culture that expects them to take such abuse and servitude.

Balram believes that the poor can only change and break out of the Rooster Coop if they are willing to sacrifice everything, including attachment to traditional morals and one’s family. However, that’s rare, and only one in a generation can do that, just like the White Tiger’s rarity.

Today, we are inundated with self-help material such as seminars, viral blog posts, New York Times Best Sellers, and YouTube shorts, all of which advise us on how to change.

We consume information. We do some work, but hardly enough to constitute real change. We don’t do enough of it on a deep level. Before we finish, we are encouraged to celebrate our wins. Instagram is full of people winning battles, but where are the scars that show we’ve won the war?

The reality is that change is not only hard but also long. We’ve all been brought up in set ways. Most of our conditioning is done in childhood. The brainwashing doesn’t only come from our parents, but theirs too—also from our teachers, our societal leaders, the media, and all the information we’ve consumed.

Propaganda works so well that switching allegiance from Coke to Pepsi is hard when both are only sugared water.

The Story of Marissa Panigrosso

In his excellent book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of hot air as intense as opening a pizza oven came through her glass windows.

She did not hesitate. She didn’t even pick up her purse, make a phone call or turn off her computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit, pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-stairway descent to the ground.

She found it curious that far more people chose to stay right where they were. They made outside calls, and even a group of colleagues entered their previously scheduled meeting.

Grosz suggests that every person in the South Tower didn’t immediately leave the building because they did not have a familiar story to guide them.

“We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.”

Why would the others remain rooted in their places in such extreme circumstances?

Because they are human, we humans find change difficult and practically impossible. From small decisions to big ones, from particular to universal, change and discomfort don’t come naturally to us.

Like most of us, they probably thought there was little chance of another plane striking their tower. Also, leaving would mean they were overreacting and running scared in front of their colleagues.

We are built to expend the least energy, be risk-averse, and conform to what the rest of the group does. That’s how we’ve survived and evolved for thousands of years.

Change requires both risk and effort. It also requires we revisit our personal history, dissecting each ancient belief to see if it still serves any purpose, just like a brilliant eye surgeon would cut into our retina with precision and complete care.

To change means confronting our sense of loss and accepting that we need to let go of old parts of ourselves because they no longer serve our new ways of being.

Marissa Panigrosso was the exception. She was a White Tiger.

Are you ready to be an exception and change the trajectory of your life?