SHANTARAM

I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country’s most wanted man.
Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I set up and ran a free clinic in a crowded Bombay slum. I joined the Bombay mafia, and worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And when those wilderness years of hunted exile came to an end, when I changed my life, when I stopped running onto the knives and started running into the light of love instead, I wrote the novel, Shantaram, that was based on my wild and wicked life."
–Gregory David Roberts, author of Shantaram


The book is a gem in every sense.It might not be a literary masterpiece.But it stands out for sheer portrayal of emotions and relations..Just like the reviews say its hard to come out of the book unscathed.The story itself is very unique and the detailing the author gives is so good that you happen to visualise everything through his eyes.Gregory David Roberts as "Linbaba" rocks!!!