“You just need to be white to win!” declared a now-famous Thai television commercial for whitening cream. For one-hundredth of the price of a year’s supply of whitening cream, Impressing the Whites explains how to be White Inside, deep inside, and thus to win far bigger and in many different fields such as literature, politics, and international business. From its irreverent comments on His Sacred Mooship, Salman Rushdie, to the phenomenon of the Occidental Cow with a billion bursting teats (“We Indians are practiced milkers!”), this controversial book is as much entertainment as it is a satire-cum-analysis of East-West, white-brown-black relations.
Though using comic exaggeration, like a Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle race routine, the book is also a passionately sincere attempt to understand and analyze the underlying forces between how nonwhites and whites behave towards each other.
The book also satirically proposes the Fourteen Commandments of Nonwhite Male Success and such phenomena as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy becoming the Spokespersons for 1.2 billion Indians.
While mostly remaining faithful to the classic original, this edition has a few added chapters, including one on the Aravind Adiga Booker Prize and Barack Obama.
