Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

One of the best books I 've ever read.Reading this reinforces the power of the human will to overcome any problem life throws up.This is esentially a fable of loyalty,friendship, love and acceptance of an alien culture.

Roberts is an escaped felon covicted of armed robbery in Australia.He lands in Bombay and engages a guide named Prabhkar.They soon became friends and when he is robbed of everything,Prabhkar offers him space in the slum where he stays.Going about under an assumed name he falls in with a group of Europeans and Indians at the Leopold's bar-Didier the hard drinking flamboyant French,Karla an enigmatic Swiss-German with a past,Ulla a German prostitute and a few others.In the slum he set up a free clinic and also becomes friends with a powerful don.After incurring the hostility of a powerful prostitute mistress,he spend time in one of the toughest Indian jails,starved,beaten and tortured within a inch of his life.Fluent in Hindi and Marathi,rare for a gora,he worked in various illegal activities like gold smuggling,passport counterfeiting and money laundering.He acted in bit pieces in Bollywood and accompanied the don to the jihad in Afganistan,smuggling guns and supplies.It costs the life of his benefactor and half dead and severly decimated group returned to India through Pakistan where they were wanted by the ISI.Coming back to Bombay,he witnesses the dead don's faction regainnig power in the factional fight.On top of all that ,he falls in and out of life.

For an ordinary mortal,this is the stuff of several lifetimes.But Linbaba or Lin ,the name by which he goes by in the underworld packs it into eight short years.Roberts is an instinctive storyteller.He has you hooked from the first page to the last and you would never know when time flies while reading it.And the most significant insight into Roberts' character is that his two earlier six hundred page manuscripts of the book were destroyed by prison guards.
This book is the basis of a Hollywood movie with the central role played by Johnny Depp.