Starting Shantaram

 

This really didn't seem necessary. But the amazing prose of Gregory David Robert's Shantaram which has made me change my signature on Gmail for 3 years, deserves a mention. I'll quote the same line

t 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 realized, somehow, through the screaming in 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. - From Gregory David Robert's novel 'Shantaram'

This is one of the many lines in the first 60 odd pages of a book which has so much of Mumbai that I'm falling in love with Mumbai once more.

It promises way too much. Really.