🔁 Episode 71 - Learning english with the book "Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts

It was published in 2003.

It's a curious book because it's at least semi-autobiographical.

You might not be very impressed by that because a lot of people write autobiographical books, but this book is quite remarkable.

If we think about what happens in the book, here's what basically happens.

I'm not going to tell you all of it because I don't want to spoil it for you.

It follows a guy called Lindsay Ford, who is supposed to be the author.

In fact, people call him Lin because of his name, Lindsay.

And he's an Australian fugitive who escapes from Pentridge prison in Australia and and manages to make it to Bombay with a false passport.

Anybody who's been to India will immediately recognize the way he talks about arriving in India and the sights and the sounds and the complexities and things that shock him.

And he doesn't just escape to India.

He connects in very deep ways with its inhabitants.

He lives in a slum where he runs a kind of a makeshift health clinic.

Makeshift means not very established.

He just did it on his own.

He learns the language Marathi and he earns the name Shantaram, which means man of God's peace.

That's what they call him, according to himself, obviously.

He falls in love with a mysterious Swiss-American woman.

And then he joins the Bombay underworld, the mafia in Bombay.

And a lot of the book is about his interactions with the mobsters or the mafia in Bombay and in other towns.

His adventures include being sent to Bombay's Arthur Road prison and surviving it.

acting in a Bollywood movie, and fighting alongside the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against Soviet forces.

It sounds like an action novel, but in fact, it's much more.

It's adventure, it's vivid storytelling, and there's a lot of philosophy and wisdom in this book.

I don't really know how to categorize it.

I do know that when it came out, Johnny Depp bought the rights to make the film.