Shantaram

Shantaram was a nice book. I liked it. I can't say i thought it was great, but i liked it. There was no slow part in the story. I never felt bored, never felt restless(which, considering the size of the book, one might be forgiven for) and never felt like stopping.

"There’s a trick nearly every writer uses, of inserting one long, obscure word into every story. This makes the reader think the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose."

"Where?"

"In the word-memory section," he said epexegetically.

I liked that. The fact that, every now and then, i'd come across a word that i'd never heard of before... In Shantaram that is, not The Great Automatic Grammatizer. Made me restart the habit of having a dictionary around when i read...

Anyway , the point of this post was to say that in the entire book, though there were many good lines, these two - well, paras i suppose - particularly caught my fancy...

"You are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return."


"...Damn right you don’t, man. This is not England, or New Zealand, or Australia, or whatever the fuck else. This is India, man. This is India. This is the land of the heart. This is where heart is king, man. The fuckin’ heart. That’s why you’re free. That’s why that cop gave you back your phoney passport. That’s why you can walk around, and not get picked up, even though they know who you are. They could’ve fucked you, Lin. They could’ve taken your money, Khader’s money, and let you go, and then get some other cops to bust you, and send you the fuck home. But they didn’t do it, and they won’t do it, because you got them in their heart, man, in their Indian fuckin’ heart. They looked at all what you did here, and how the people in that slum love you, and they thought, "Well, he fucked up in Australia, but he’s done some good shit here. If he pays up, we’ll let the fucker go." Because they’re Indians, man. That’s how we keep this crazy place together – with the heart. Two hundred fuckin’ languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It’s the heart that keeps us together. There’s no place with people like my people, Lin. There’s no heart like the Indian heart."

The first one, apparently, is an old Pashto saying... I like it...

On the other hand, the second one... well the second one's just plain poetic!! :)