At the age of 18, a poor waiter called Ram does the unthinkable and wins a billion rupees at a game show. The central question that comes up is how much of this has to do with luck, and how much of this is destiny. In the beginning, Ram himself says that he was lucky to have got the questions that he was able to answer based on his life stories. However, all of these life stories are tragedies of some sort, outlining the harsh conditions he and his friends had to endure to reach the current state of happiness.
Since the story is set in India, naturally karma comes to mind, and somehow even the darkest hours of Ram’s life have contributed to his current success, even if he did not realize this at the time. Whatever he seems to lose at first, he later gains with interest. For example, he gives away 400,000 rupees to a father who wants to buy medicine for his son to save his life. In the short run, this act of kindness saves him from the police (after all, he stole the money from his landlady), but in the long run it secured the grand prize in the game show because this father, an English teacher, helped him find the correct answer to the final question. Had he not given away the money, he would be rotting in a prison cell instead. Moreover, he loses the love of his life at first because he is not able to pay for her freedom, but then finally marries her after winning the billion rupees.
So is it purely karma? Throughout the novel, Ram meets people who are as kind or even kinder than him, and they do not meet the same fate. In fact, they suffer and perish. For example, Father Timothy, who treats him like his own son, is murdered; Shankar, an autistic boy who deeply cares for Ram, dies of rabies; Nita, who discovers her love for Ram has to continue to work as a prostitute and is subjected to abuse. Why are they--or millions of others for that matter--not winning a billion rupees?
Maybe it is a little bit of luck then. After all, he flips his lucky coin whenever he has to make an important decision. However, at the end of the novel, Ram reveals that the two sides of his lucky coin are the same face. He tosses the coin into the sea, saying “I don’t need it any more. Because luck comes from within,“ which indicates that he believes courage, confidence, and determination, which are all factors that he can influence, are more powerful to reaching one’s goals than relying on an external factor called luck.
