33 pages • 1 hour read
Mohsin HamidHow to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Movies
The narrator and the pretty girl initially bond over movies. He is working as a delivery boy for pirated DVDs and she asks him to acquire the most popular title for her. Their ensuing, sporadic phone calls are spent talking about the movies, the actors in them, and anything else of a cinematic nature that interests her. The narrator does not maintain his interest in movies in the same way she does. At various points in the novel she is shown with a movie on in the background, a fact that is noticed even when she is being surveilled by the drone. Later, she and the narrator go to a movie in their old age and find that movies still feel like the most natural thing for them to talk about.
Movies in the novel are a distraction, an entertainment, and an escape from real life. They are a symbol of the need that the narrator and the pretty girl have to forget who they are, although they also serve as the tool that begins their relationship.
Water
The water in the narrator’s town is unhealthy and sometimes undrinkable. He and his sister’s play near streams of sewage that flow through the village streets. When he begins the water bottling operation that will lead to his greatest financial gains, it is a reminder of the impoverished circumstances that many of his clans people find themselves in. He will earn a fortune providing drinkable, clean water, something that is taken for granted in much of the world. The theme of the divide between the rich and the poor is present in the commoditization of water, because the poor can often not afford to buy the bottled water. They must risk becoming sick to slake their thirst.
The meetings with the bureaucrat, the politician, and the brigadier general further reinforce the mercenary calculations with which the production and sale of water is approached. Clean water is never discussed as something people need—except by the people who cannot get it—but as a tool by which entrepreneurs can profit.
Money
Wealth creation is the novel’s proclaimed goal. Money represents the ability to purchase items, but it is a symbol of freedom and choices. Many of the people cannot even afford to buy clean water. It is the matriarch’s money that pays for the surgery of the narrator’s mother. The pretty girl offers her body to men who can advance her career in order to gain the money that will let her escape from her town. The robbers who kill the pretty girl’s assistant are there to steal money that will most likely be used to further other criminal actions. Everyone in the novel has a relationship to money, or its lack.
By the end of the novel, the narrator has shown that money is not a guarantee of success or of happiness. Money is, at its best, shown to be a tool that can open up a wider range of choices and opportunities to those who have it. At its worst, it leads people to kill, steal, threaten, and can even wield undue influence over entire governments.
Related Titles
By Mohsin Hamid
