Shantaram
(Gregory David Roberts)
The book "Shantaram" by an Australian called Gregory David Roberts has really touched my heart. The story covers a long period in India and then in Afghanistan. Since I am an Indian, I was initially fascinated by his vivid description of Mumbai. But gradually, as the book progressed, I realized, that it was a totally different picture of Mumbai that Roberts is presenting here. The places are familiar, sometimes the situations too, but there is a totally different angle to it. I am ashamed to say that I don''t know most of the things about India that Roberts relates in a matter-of-fact way, though I am a citizen of this country. I admire his guts and his reticence in his dealings with the slum-dwellers and his "war mates" in Afghanistan, and that''s where I realized, that only a non-Indian (I don''t want to call him a foreigner, because he speaks the language of the country fluently) could see certain things through his eyes. It is a 1000-page book, but one flees through it as if it is a movie and you have lived life in a slum with the worthiest neighbors ever, then in a stench-filled prison in India and face gunfire, death, hunger just like any other cruel man-made war on this earth. The love stories are so poignant, that you stop to believe that there is so much human cruelty in the world. Yet love has another side, and each one has so many secrets to hide, not to forget the secrets of the protagonist himself. You do ask yourself often, why he goes through these hard times and sure enough there comes an answer. Certain situations are meticulously described, especially the scene at night when he and a boy are attacked by wild dogs before entering the slum. You think every minute they are gone, torn to pieces by the hounded wolves and they slash back again and again miraculously. They have to win, it''s just the beginning of the book, but how it is done is just breathtaking. Scenes of war and the wounded, scenes in the prison-cells are so filled with detail, you wonder how human beings can survive there. The book was published 4 years ago, so you may have already read it, but if you haven''t, do it now, you won''t know how time goes by!!!!!
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