| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Biographies & Memoirs |
| Author: | Gregory David Roberts |
Its a true story. The author is an Australian fugitive, who comes to Bombay in the early 80's, looking for refuge. In the eight years he spent here, he lives in a Bombay slum, establishes a free health clinic there, joins the mafia, works as a money launderer, forger and street soldier. He gets fluent in Hindi and Marathi, which earns him the respect of the local people. He also finds time to fall in love with a very beautiful and very complex woman. He also spends time being worked over in an infamous jail. And thats not it...he also acted in Bollywood and fought with the Mujahideed in Afghanistan against the USSR.
Amazingly...this book was written three times after the prison guards trashed the first two versions.
Not a book to miss by any means!
1 comment:
Drawing parallels between Shantaram and Bikini Island (t-i-c)
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While Reading Shantaram, i was reminded about the serial - Bikini Island :D.. and once that association struck, it stayed stuck. Further reading only confirmed my theory.
The novel is good, awesome etc etc.. but the impact of the novel wore off slightly from the halfway stage..
I noticed a pattern in the way in which each chapter ends almost as if perfunctorily the author has to take a step back and make sense of it all i.e. give some gyaaan. This is the special end-of-chapter gyaan quite different from the regular gyaan (domain knowledge) which he is well equipped to provide.
Each chapter of Shantaram == An episode of bikini island
In bikini island, after the gist of the episode is over (the model shoots), the narrator talks of sunsets, sunkist beaches, sand, locales, panaromas/nature/wildlife since time immerorial blah blah..
Similarly in Shantaram, Lin is walking towards a character B to have tea (say) but since this happens at the end of the chapter, the template necessitates that the event cant just be an innocuous event.. hence the author take a step back anad talks of how the clouds and stars and the solar systems and the plutos/neptunes are all saying the same thing now and have been saying so since the earliest of times in the land mass which is india/mumbai/whereever..
Next chapter.. life goes on, Lin meets B, has Tea and says..
"Chaai achchi hai, saale" (milder expletive!!)
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