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Shantaram #1, part 3 of 3
Shantaram - Del 3
Det här är den tredje delen av Shantaram. I början av 1980-talet begick australiensaren Gregory David Roberts en rad väpnade rån för att bekosta sitt heroinmissbruk. Han åkte fast men lyckades rymma från ett av Australiens mest välbevakade fängelser. På falskt pass tog han sig sedan till Indien och anonymiteten i den myllrande miljonstaden Bombay. Shantaram är Gregory David Roberts egen berättelse från de händelserika och omtumlande åren som förrymd fånge i Bombays undre värld. I ett av stadens slumområden öppnar han en sjukvårdsmottagning för de fattiga och nödställda. Han arbetar för maffian som pengatvättare och förfalskare av pass och han följer med maffialedaren Abdel Khader Khan till Afghanistan för att förse mujaheddin med vapen i kampen mot ryssarna. Han kastas i indiskt fängelse och får utstå tortyr och svält. I den grönögda mystiska Karla möter han kärleken.
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Published July 31, 2014
1 person is currently reading
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About the author
Gregory David Roberts
15 books4,366 followersGregory David Roberts (GDR) is an Australian artist, composer, songwriter, and author of Shantaram, its sequel, The Mountain Shadow, and The Spiritual Path.
Following the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of custody of his daughter, he turned to heroin to numb the pain, and crime to feed his habit. In 1978, Roberts was sentenced to 19 years in prison for armed robbery (with a plastic weapon), he escaped and spent eight years in Bombay as a fugitive. Here he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers and worked as a counterfeiter and smuggler for a branch of the South Bombay mafia.
Recaptured and extradited to Australia, he served out his sentence, which included two years in solitary confinement as a punishment for his escape. The time in solitary was to become a turning point in his life. When released, Roberts completed writing Shantaram and it was published in 2003 to critical acclaim. He returned to Mumbai where he set up a personal initiative to assist the city's poor with lifesaving healthcare.
In the years that followed he became an in-demand public speaker and philosopher and received thousands of messages from readers saying the book had been “life changing”. Roberts went ‘off-grid’ in 2014 to look after his sick parents and pursue a spiritual path of devotion.
In 2019, he established a multimedia company, Empathy Arts, and the following year released his debut album Love&Faith, which was recorded at Geejam Studios in Jamaica. The same year saw the release of his first non-fiction book The Spiritual Path.
Roberts’ life affirming messages on social media, of taking personal responsibility, never giving up, living a purposeful life and embracing our common humanity, have resonated with people across the world.
In October 2022, the TV series Shantaram based on the book, aired on AppleTV+. Roberts currently resides in Jamaica, where he continues to write, produce music and create art.
Following the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of custody of his daughter, he turned to heroin to numb the pain, and crime to feed his habit. In 1978, Roberts was sentenced to 19 years in prison for armed robbery (with a plastic weapon), he escaped and spent eight years in Bombay as a fugitive. Here he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers and worked as a counterfeiter and smuggler for a branch of the South Bombay mafia.
Recaptured and extradited to Australia, he served out his sentence, which included two years in solitary confinement as a punishment for his escape. The time in solitary was to become a turning point in his life. When released, Roberts completed writing Shantaram and it was published in 2003 to critical acclaim. He returned to Mumbai where he set up a personal initiative to assist the city's poor with lifesaving healthcare.
In the years that followed he became an in-demand public speaker and philosopher and received thousands of messages from readers saying the book had been “life changing”. Roberts went ‘off-grid’ in 2014 to look after his sick parents and pursue a spiritual path of devotion.
In 2019, he established a multimedia company, Empathy Arts, and the following year released his debut album Love&Faith, which was recorded at Geejam Studios in Jamaica. The same year saw the release of his first non-fiction book The Spiritual Path.
Roberts’ life affirming messages on social media, of taking personal responsibility, never giving up, living a purposeful life and embracing our common humanity, have resonated with people across the world.
In October 2022, the TV series Shantaram based on the book, aired on AppleTV+. Roberts currently resides in Jamaica, where he continues to write, produce music and create art.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 2, 2023
Fantastic story about a prison escapee living in India and his involvement in that big city underworld. True story about the author himself...and the best book I've read in a LONG time!
"My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one could really hurt me. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man."
"There's a truth that's deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay."
"If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, if we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is -- a way of earning the future."
"...the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it."
"...if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less."
"There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment."
"Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them."
"...is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much?"
"I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness."
"...what we learn from pain -- for example, that fire burns and is dangerous -- is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God."
"Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of myself."
"Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered."
"They were poor, tired, worried men, but they were Indian, and any Indian man will tell you that although love might not have been invented in India, it was certainly perfected there."
"The black and brooding sky finally ruptured and cracked. Lightning ripped into the Arabian Sea, and thunder followed with deafening applause."
"Prisons are the temples where evils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate."
"The truth that filled their eyes was something we only ever know about ourselves in cruel and desperate hunger. I took it into myself, that truth, and the part of my heart that broke to see it has never healed."
"That's why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words."
"Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved."
"Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims."
"I sat beside him in the drift of coloured shadows, loving the honesty and toughness in him, and pitying the hatreds that weakened him and lied to him."
"The contrast between those rusted, graceless hulks and the elegant wooden boats beside them spoke a history, a modern saga, a world story that moved from life at sea, as a romantic calling, to the profiteer's cold, efficient lusting for the bottom line."
"Moonlight rushed with every rolling wave to the shore, as if the light itself was pulling the waves, as if the great net of silver light cast by the moon had gathered up the whole of the sea, and was hauling it to the shore, wave by wave."
"Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves."
"He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. ... I also agree with Winson Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject."
"Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep."
"The everything-and-nothing drug: it takes everything, and gives you nothing in return. But the nothing it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want."
"...and what it cost was a million Afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history -- three-and-a-half million refugees moving through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul."
"The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity -- another of my favourite five-syllable English words -- that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupied no space and no time, as we know those things. The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand -- we don't know yet what caused it -- and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist. along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways."
"We hid, creeping through shadows in the daylight hours, and huddled together without light or heat in the darkness every night. And slowly, one ice-edged hour at a time, the knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive."
"And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and god forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step."
"There's only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun."
"You can't reason with a man who has no sense of money and its...its value. It's the one thing all civilised men have in common, don't you agree? If money doesn't mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing."
"And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only good at what they do if they stay humble."
"All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret."
"Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and red the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well of poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be."
"That convergence of interests drove more than a few producers and production houses into strange syzgies with gangsters: films about mafia goondas were financed by the mafia, and the profits from hit movies about hit men went into new crimes and real hits on real people, which in turn became the subjects for screenplays and new films financed by more mafia money."
"They couldn't understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.
"My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one could really hurt me. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man."
"There's a truth that's deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay."
"If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, if we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is -- a way of earning the future."
"...the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it."
"...if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less."
"There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment."
"Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them."
"...is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much?"
"I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness."
"...what we learn from pain -- for example, that fire burns and is dangerous -- is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God."
"Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of myself."
"Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered."
"They were poor, tired, worried men, but they were Indian, and any Indian man will tell you that although love might not have been invented in India, it was certainly perfected there."
"The black and brooding sky finally ruptured and cracked. Lightning ripped into the Arabian Sea, and thunder followed with deafening applause."
"Prisons are the temples where evils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate."
"The truth that filled their eyes was something we only ever know about ourselves in cruel and desperate hunger. I took it into myself, that truth, and the part of my heart that broke to see it has never healed."
"That's why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words."
"Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved."
"Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims."
"I sat beside him in the drift of coloured shadows, loving the honesty and toughness in him, and pitying the hatreds that weakened him and lied to him."
"The contrast between those rusted, graceless hulks and the elegant wooden boats beside them spoke a history, a modern saga, a world story that moved from life at sea, as a romantic calling, to the profiteer's cold, efficient lusting for the bottom line."
"Moonlight rushed with every rolling wave to the shore, as if the light itself was pulling the waves, as if the great net of silver light cast by the moon had gathered up the whole of the sea, and was hauling it to the shore, wave by wave."
"Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves."
"He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. ... I also agree with Winson Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject."
"Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep."
"The everything-and-nothing drug: it takes everything, and gives you nothing in return. But the nothing it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want."
"...and what it cost was a million Afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history -- three-and-a-half million refugees moving through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul."
"The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity -- another of my favourite five-syllable English words -- that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupied no space and no time, as we know those things. The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand -- we don't know yet what caused it -- and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist. along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways."
"We hid, creeping through shadows in the daylight hours, and huddled together without light or heat in the darkness every night. And slowly, one ice-edged hour at a time, the knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive."
"And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and god forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step."
"There's only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun."
"You can't reason with a man who has no sense of money and its...its value. It's the one thing all civilised men have in common, don't you agree? If money doesn't mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing."
"And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only good at what they do if they stay humble."
"All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret."
"Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and red the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well of poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be."
"That convergence of interests drove more than a few producers and production houses into strange syzgies with gangsters: films about mafia goondas were financed by the mafia, and the profits from hit movies about hit men went into new crimes and real hits on real people, which in turn became the subjects for screenplays and new films financed by more mafia money."
"They couldn't understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.
April 16, 2018
Третья часть также как и первые две на одном дыхании. Читаю четвертую.
January 27, 2025
读书的好处，就是可以在短时间内低成本的感受到别人的一生。这本书给我的冲击是多方面的，除了情节精彩，充满异域风情之外，还有对生命与命运本身的思考。强烈推荐。
September 1, 2014
Shantaram av Gregory David Roberts.
Under lång tid har jag levt i Indien, besökt Afghanistan, varit i indiskt fängelse, bott i slummen, levt som en knarkare, ja jag har verkligen levt mig in i berättelsen om Shantaram, det indiska namn som australiensaren Gregory David Roberts fick i en liten indisk by, när han hade flytt från fängelse i Australien till Indien.
Det här är en mäktig bok, otroliga personskildringar som får mig att gråta när någon dör, att skratta med dem när något går bra, att lida, att vara där. Djupa tankar och lättsinne, ja den här boken har i stort sett allt. Det här är en otroligt tjock bok, men värd varenda timmas läsning. Rekommenderar den varmt!
Baksidestexten:
I början av 1980-talet begick australiensaren Gregory David Roberts en rad väpnade rån för att bekosta sitt heroinmissbruk. Han åkte fast men lyckades rymma från ett av Australiens mest välbevakade fängelser. På falskt pass tog han sig sedan till Indien och anonymiteten i den myllrande miljonstaden Bombay. Shantaram är Gregory David Roberts egen berättelse från de händelserika och omtumlande åren som förrymd fånge i Bombays undre värld. I ett av stadens slumområden öppnar han en sjukvårdsmottagning för de fattiga och nödställda. Han arbetar för maffian som pengatvättare och förfalskare av pass och han följer med maffialedaren Abdel Khader Khan till Afghanistan för att förse mujaheddin med vapen i kampen mot ryssarna. Han kastas i indiskt fängelse och får utstå tortyr och svält. I den grönögda mystiska Karla möter han kärleken.
Under lång tid har jag levt i Indien, besökt Afghanistan, varit i indiskt fängelse, bott i slummen, levt som en knarkare, ja jag har verkligen levt mig in i berättelsen om Shantaram, det indiska namn som australiensaren Gregory David Roberts fick i en liten indisk by, när han hade flytt från fängelse i Australien till Indien.
Det här är en mäktig bok, otroliga personskildringar som får mig att gråta när någon dör, att skratta med dem när något går bra, att lida, att vara där. Djupa tankar och lättsinne, ja den här boken har i stort sett allt. Det här är en otroligt tjock bok, men värd varenda timmas läsning. Rekommenderar den varmt!
Baksidestexten:
I början av 1980-talet begick australiensaren Gregory David Roberts en rad väpnade rån för att bekosta sitt heroinmissbruk. Han åkte fast men lyckades rymma från ett av Australiens mest välbevakade fängelser. På falskt pass tog han sig sedan till Indien och anonymiteten i den myllrande miljonstaden Bombay. Shantaram är Gregory David Roberts egen berättelse från de händelserika och omtumlande åren som förrymd fånge i Bombays undre värld. I ett av stadens slumområden öppnar han en sjukvårdsmottagning för de fattiga och nödställda. Han arbetar för maffian som pengatvättare och förfalskare av pass och han följer med maffialedaren Abdel Khader Khan till Afghanistan för att förse mujaheddin med vapen i kampen mot ryssarna. Han kastas i indiskt fängelse och får utstå tortyr och svält. I den grönögda mystiska Karla möter han kärleken.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews