Book Report: Shantaram
Author: Gregory David Roberts
Pages: 929
Date: 3/22/25
Book Summary:
I finished reading Shantaram this morning. It was one of the best books I have read in a long time. It was very hard to put down. It follows the protagonist, Lindsay (called Lin in the book), as he arrives in Bombay, India – probably in mid 1970’s. He meets Prabu, who becomes his official guide and takes him to live with him in a village where he learns the Majarashti language over six months. It is in the village that he gets his Indian name – Shantaram. Right before going to the village, he meets Karla, a Swiss-American woman who he almost instantly fell in love with. She comes in and out of the story multiple times. Lin returns to Bombay and lives in the slums where he operates a free medical clinic using his elementary first aid and supplies that the has on him. He does this for several years. At the end of this period, he simultaneously starts acting as an advisor to the Bombay Mafia. They want to get a Westerner’s perspective on certain things that are happening.
Karla needs his help to rescue an American woman from a brothel, so Lin impersonates an American Embassy consular officer to get her out. Later in the story, he finally makes love to the evasive Karla. On his way home, he is picked up by the police and remanded to one of the most horrific prisons in India. The conditions are undescribable and he is beaten/tortured multiple times over his three month stay. Khanderbai, head of the mafia, finally gets him out and helps him recover physically and starts training him on all aspects of the mafia business – document forgery, gold smuggling & black market currency transactions. This mafia does not involve itself in drugs or prostitution as they see that as a “sinful crime.” At this time, Lin starts to think of Khanderbai as a surrogate father.
Finally, Khanebai intends to smuggle weapons and medicine out of Pakistan to Kandahar, Afghanistan to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. Although a major portion of the book, I can summarize it by saying that they were betrayed by someone in their group, they suffered immensely during the journey and while holed up there and the majority of the group, including Khanderbai, were killed. Right before Lin left for Afghanistan, he found out who got him arrested & tortured in prison and he vowed to return to Bombay and kill them. When he returns, one of Khanderbai’s lieutenants takes over the mafia business and Lin takes over the document forgery portion of the business. He finds the person responsible for his prison stint, but ultimately does not kill them. He reconnects briefly with Karla, but elects not to go with her as she leaves India and the story. The end of the story finds him reconnecting with so many of the characters with whom he met over the course of his time in India. At the end of the story, he is offered an opportunity in Sri Lanka that he is considering – but we don’t know whether he took it or not.
This book had so many interesting and informative phrases & sayings in it. I listed out my favorite ones listed below – mostly in the order that I read them. These are the main things, aside from the actual story, that I learned from this book. They are listed out as they are stated – even though it sounds like I might be the one stating it.
* Being listened to-really listened to-is the second-best thing in the world. One guy thinks money is the best thing in the world. Lin says “No, that is not correct – freedom is the best thing in the world. The freedom to say no and even more important, to have the freedom to say yes.”
* Flashbacks are common to ex-prisoners, cops, soldiers, fire fighters, and others who see & experience trauma.
* The politics of fear. I hate politics, and politicians even more. They make a religion of being greedy.
* A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there is no river.
* The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.
* There is no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favor the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. Every day the courts confirmed what they learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.
* Civilization is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.
* The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you are thinking. The corollary to this is: always know what the other thinks of you.
* Imprisonment means years without a sunrise, a sunset, or a night sky, locked in a cell for 16 hours each day, from early afternoon to late morning. It means that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn’t hell, but there was no heaven in it either. In its own way, that was just as bad.
* Ask any man with a long enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice.
* Prison systems are black holes for human bodies: no light escapes from them, and no news.
* The only victory that really counts in prison, is survival.
* The two fastest ways to develop a loathing for the human race and its destiny is to serve it food, or clean up after it, at the minimum wage.
* Love is the only cure for loneliness, shame and sorrow. In prison, you feel that you let everyone down; you don’t deserve to live; and the world would be better off without you.
* The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance is that it works so well.
* There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.
* Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie.
* The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men. It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and bad deeds.
* Good doctors have at least 3 things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen and they are very tired.
* Abdel Khader Khan dreams the future, and then he plans it, and then he makes it happen.
* Suffering is the way we test our love, especially our love for God.
* Suffering was not necessarily a sign of weakness, but insisting that we could toughen ourselves against it with a strong will; strenght of will coming from strict self-discipline, a kind of self-imposed suffering.
* We know that real suffering is measured by what is taken away from us.
* Why do bad people suffer so little? And why do good people suffer so much?
* The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The first group are the very rich and the very powerful, whose decisions really count. The stupid men are the policemen and soldiers who enforce the rule of the evil men. The hundred million cowards are the bureaucrats, paper-shufflers and pencil pushers who permit the rule of the evil men and look the other way.
* News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.
* Some of the worst wrongs were caused by people who tried to change things.
* Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they are not alone; and causing pain is how they grieve.
* Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us in the end.
* The worst things that people do to us always makes us feel ashamed. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we are violated, is shame at being human.
* You can’t kill love. You cannot even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving and even loveliness, but you cannot kill love itself.
* There are men who commit crimes and there are criminals; and there is a difference between the two.
* Black markets for things exist because the white markets are too strict.
* Greed without control or control without greed won’t give you a black market. When greed meets control, you get a black market.
* We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime. In things like human slavery, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profits he makes.
* Money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, and it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to the it the dirtier you get.
* Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong – that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.
* Victor Frankl said that sex and power were important drives, but when you cannot get either one, no sex and no power, there is still something that drives us on. It is the drive for meaning.
* No political philosophy I have ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. 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.
* Al the secret police of the world work together; and that is their biggest secret.
* Depression only happens to people how don’t know how to be sad.
* A Dutch mercenary in Kinchasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all.
* You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
* Love is what makes men big and hate is what makes them small.
* I agree with Winston Churchill who once defined a fanatic as someone who WON’T change his mind and CAN’T change the subject.
* We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.
* A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.
* I don’t think that light is God. I think it is possible, and it is reasonable to say, that light is the LANGUAGE of God. Light may be the way that Gos speaks to the universe, and to us.
* The only kingdom that makes a man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.
Things that I learned that will increase my prospects for success after prison:
* “The truth is that no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or single act of love.” This was one of my favorite phrases in the book and something I truly believe in. I attempt to practice it everyday by helping someone with their GED, giving advice to someone or cracking a joke to boost someone’s mood.
* “A friend of mine has a strange, anti-magnetic effect on machines: watches stop on their wrists, radio receivers crackle and photo copy machines glitch whenever she is near.” This phrase doesn’t have anything to do with increasing my prospects for success after prison, but it is something that I thought applied to me. Everything I touch that is electronic stops working. This is the first time I saw it expressed in print, so put it down because I believe it describes me very well.
