ShAnTaRaM

Shantaram is written by Gregory David Roberts, a convicted Australian bank robber and heroin addict who escaped from Pentridge Prison and fled to India where he lived for 10 years.

Just look at an excerpt form the book...

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

Shantaram is a novel based on the life of the author, Australian Gregory David Roberts. In 1978 Roberts was sentenced to nineteen years’ imprisonment in Australia as punishment for a series of armed robberies of building-society branches, credit unions, and shops he had committed while addicted to heroin. In July 1980 he escaped from Victoria’s maximum-security prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one of Australia’s most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.

For most of this period, after an interlude in New Zealand, he lived in Bombay. After meeting a local man named Prabaker, who later becomes his best friend, he sets up a free health clinic in the slums where he learns about the Indian culture and characteristics of the people he later comes to love. He later works for Afghani mafia don "Abdel Khader Khan" and works in black market currency exchange and passport forgery. He later goes to Afghanistan to smuggle weapons for mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan, where his mentor Khan is killed. He realizes he became everything he grew to loathe and falls into a depressive state after he returns. He ends up realizing that he must fight for what he believes is right, and build an honest life in Bombay.

One of the most simple and beautiful book.