Shantaram:One Real Quote of a book

Some books are all about hype…and Some books are those hidden treasure that few savor. Then there are books that actually live up or rather deserve the hype.

Shantaram is one….Only other i thought so was Harry Potter.I know some wonderful chaps who never read the book and just saw the movie would call Potter a childrens fantasy hangover for adults.Ask someone who has read the book and not seen the movie.Some say there are other better writers and books….oh sure there would be , but would that mean Potter ain’t good.
Anyways this post is all about Shantaram - the book by Gregory Roberts i spent April 07 with.

If this books been hailed as a wonderful adventure and masterpiece it is every bit of it.Seems like i am having a voluminous book year. March was all about re reading that voluptous ” A Suitable boy” by Seth and now this.But well i am hardly complaining.

The books a treasure trove of quotes. In fact i so loved half of the lines in the book that id wanted to return the book to the library and buy it but i wish i could afford the prime space it would occupy in my meagre shelves.

Ok well they are clever lines, sad lines and touching lines but the best part for me is a whole part of it is in bantering talk between people, a genre that i love rather than a brooding or thoughtful narration by an author.

Be it movies or books where there smart clever wordplay i like it. Oh yeah its a weakness but yeah i enjoy it and thus if for nothing else just that makes the book special.
And if i was loving it soo much and wondering that only i thought so about it well nah i just looked up on orkut a community out there for it has put up many of the quotes(http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=627868&tid=9029383&start=1) I painstakingly wrote into my notebook so i can reread when i return the book. Funny but well great discovery.I’m glad cause i just cannot afford to put up all the quotes i copied or page numbers i marked. Its one heck quote of a book. Its better bought than borrowed .The book is set in Bombay and throughout it the author speaks of his love for the city. Amazing that at the same time so many books set in Bombay have come out. I’ve read Maximum city and while that in itself is a lovely book i blogged on, this one’s quite different. The perspectives and the eyes who talk you through are different.

In maximum city what the author talks of in real time we understand and feel cause its the city life and India’s own special madness but his thoughts , feelings and perspectives may not be as similar ….cause he speaks based on his opportune research and meeting with the set of people he weaved into stories.Maximum city is a very good book and marvellous insightful book but yeah Shantaram is much much more.

There’s enough about its story on the internet, how its based on a true story and why add my bit to it. All i can say is whether its fact or fiction it hardly matters. They are so interchangeable in there and its beautiful. Its not only a wonderful read , if one takes just the story its quite thrillingly told and yeah even those who only read detective and thrillers will sort of like it i guess, unless they are like those people who like things absolutely like pure action movies where nothing matters but the punch.

The characters have a charm about them…everyone i guess, its hard to take sides if you really have a heart.Karla is well, quite some character thats fleshed out and what i liked about the book was the way it simply withstood when all had changed.
As its said some people bounce back like say Lisa in it and some harden and its never the same.The way karla puts it
” I’m cold inside Lin. I like people and I like things but i dont love any of them- not even myself - and i dont really care about them. and you know the strange thing is , I don’t really wish that i did care“
It reminds of a cold heartless feel that sometimes overtakes one, though unlike Karla most people usually get over it.
But i think one of my favorite for the sheer practicality of it is the following .

” People haven’t stopped beleiving in love. They have stopped wanting to be in love. They just dont beleive in happy endings anymore. They still beleive in love, and falling in love but now they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin“

Shantaram is what most can never understand in real time, no one imagines or can really imagine that fear and all that prison torture and gun running etc, but everyone has their own hells and fears and prisons and when faced with them the philosophies we take to ,the arguments we put against ,and for ourselves are what one relates to and catches your attention.

Karla’s a very specially sketched character and of course for anyone who loves sharp lines its great but then i liked the way all her clever lines are waved away by Lin at a point in the book.In facts the main character is the person whose character is kept most subtle. All others kind of are so very sharp. Even the parts on the mafia are dealt as they are not like putting a glamorized look onto them. I liked the part where Lin’s poor friends refuse to take up job in the counterfeit passport making business, and its true such people exist. Some refuse for fear some,for principle .As i read it i wondered Who can be the judge of who’s braver, the ones who keep fighting every day for their causes or the one who give up and accept their fate.After all to accept the fate one needs to fight one’s own self or may be some people just hide from their own selves.
Another of those words that i’ve often thought of myself was this– because, there are always a small set of people i’ve known who are stupid or mean and even callous and yet i manage to feel sorry for them and cant hurt them at times in ways beyond me.

” Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid or angry we feel about it later. They’re the canaries kind of , in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling for them when they let us down , we are in deep trouble”
Of course my own obsession with the book can also be attributed to another thing, the book uplifts the importance of freedom and how much of it can be rooted in the mind.”Freedom to say no”
There’s cynicism and an counteracting hope filled in every next line and you wander between them feeling and knowing the sheer truth of being a cynic and still wandering over to hope as thats what keeps one going on.
Not that i did not find flaws .Most unpalatable to me was his idealizing Prabaker’s village. Now anyone who’s been to a real village will know it ain’t all that pretty and filled with such wonderful sweet large hearted people. They have their own share of jealousies, killings and mean heartless criminals.Also some parts especially like the kano bear story and some stuff in Afghanistan seemed like could have been happily trimmed off.

But such things are so easily overlooked in such a gem.
Mira Nair’s making a movie on it i heard and like most , i do beleive movies however well made usually never live up to a good book.I’ve left out a whole bunch of quotes and yet such a voluminous post.Well its a really fine book….fact or fictions not my bother.

Some gems i typed but honestly there are much better ones on most pages.I need to re read the book. Reading it with an intention to finish it in 40 days was a bit too much. I read it only 10 days may be but i intend to enjoy it on some slow days of life again…sometime. For now though it was an exhilarating read.
“when we fall in love with someone our greatest fear is that they wont love us back,what we should fear instead is that we wont stop loving them.. “

” Personality and person identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them”

“Truth is a bully we all pretend to like “

“Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to ;et them work it out themselves”
“Some feelings sink so deep into the heartthat only loneliness can help u find them again.”

“sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears”

Its not more like you agree with most of whats in there but as Lin comments somewhere in there you like how its said.Thats a different charm altogether.