The Only Book You Need to Understand Urban India
Shantaram By Gregory David Roberts
The only book you need to understand urban India
The only book you need to understand urban India
The author: David Gregory Roberts
by Ignatius Chithelen 2005
Despite this fictional story being nearly 1,000 pages long, I could not stop once I started reading. Apparently based on Roberts’ life, it firmly places Bombay, now Mumbai, on the World literary map.
In addition to the wide cast of characters, who are drawn to India’s commercial capital, Roberts’ accurately and affectionately portrays the city’s sights, smells, sounds and tastes. It is doubtful that people who read the book – and perhaps also those who see the upcoming movie - will ever discuss Bombay without mentioning Shantaram.
A movie based on the novel, with Johnny Depp in the lead, is to be released in 2009.
As the review in the UK Telegraph, one of the better ones, noted, “…it's difficult to dislike Shantaram, for all its excess. Part of the extreme length may be chalked up to the seemingly endless generosity Roberts pours into people he obviously loved a great deal. That love comes through as genuine warmth and goes a long way to mitigating what can occasionally be the gratingly heroic way Roberts portrays himself.
“Shantaram is an exuberant, swashbuckling story of derring-do, told with reckless gusto and obvious affection, and if Roberts is no sort of stylist (and he isn't), you'd have to be a snob not to admit to enjoying yourself.”
Shantaram Author's easy cure for writer’s block: "I know this sounds terrible (to other writers), but I never get writer’s block.
I never get time to write all that I want to write, and I always have several projects on the desk at the one time. Maybe, being leg-ironed in maximum security prisons on three continents, and having a price on your head as your nation’s Most Wanted Man while you roam the world for 10 years as a gun-runner, passport forger, gold smuggler, and mafia soldier, in between stints in two wars and setting up and running a clinic for 25,000 slum dwellers, and acting in Bollywood movies when you’re not singing as the front man for a successful rock band … maybe that’s a cure for writer’s block, and heck, it seemed to work just fine for me, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else."
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