Just finished the book “Shantaram”. Although the ending didn’t live up to what preceded it, every page of the book was a delicious revelation, every paragraph had a dash of genius in its ideas. From the back cover:

” In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year sentence. After two years, he escaped from a maximum- security prison, spending the next ten years on the run as Australia’s most wanted man. Hiding in Bombay, he established a medical clinic for slum- dwellers, worked in the Bollywood film industry and served time in the notorious Arthur Road prison. He was recruited by one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia for whom he worked as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler, and fought alongside a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. His debut novel, SHANTARAM, is based on this ten-year period of his life in Bombay. The result is an epic tale of slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films. A gripping adventure story, SHANTARAM is also a superbly written meditation on good and evil and an authentic evocation of Bombay life.”

It makes for compulsive page turning, and there doesn’t exist a single dull moment in the entire 900 page volume. Some quotes worth re-reading the book for:

“You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.”

“A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call it a nightmare.”

“I?d only give you advice if I didn?t care what happens to you.”

“Suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end ? the end that the master holds in his hand.”

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope, sometimes we cry with everything except tears. in the end that?s all that there is ? love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that?s all we have - to hold on tight until dawn.”

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart
that only loneliness can help u find them again.
Some truths are so painful that only shame can help u live with them.
Some things are so sad that only our soul can do the crying for it.”

“If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you just don’t get the joke.”

“Sometimes you’ve to surrender before you win.”

I am hooked for life. Happily :)

I categorically maintain that there is one job that beats all others hands-down when it comes to being boring. It beats Doctoral Professorship, proctocology, ear-cleaners, railway-crossing attendants, airport baggage handlers et al. The occupation that is mind-numbingly boring to the point that each one of your grey cells stage a walk-out individually, is that of the local building securitywala.

Here’s a person who sits and waits for the next day to come. That’s it. He’s like a private study subject of the Grim Reaper, inching towards his own QED. He thrives on inaction, and he knows that he is an essential permanent fixture, like one of the unobtrusive fire extinguishers on the wall. He is a person who actually has the time in his job to watch himself grow old, one day at a time. One of my secret theories holds that we go to work just because we need something to keep us from worrying about senility and its associated assortments. And this is all the poor guy on his mini-chair does.

He has an astounding level of patience, and a will to do nothing. He can just sit around, sleep in their chairs, and generally live a half-awake existence without any qualms whatsoever. The sense of everyday urgency or to do something worthwhile or to be reaching somewhere, someone, soon, just doesn’t even connect to him as logic or habit.

Dunno whether to pity him or envy him.

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