Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

It’s a crazy biography written while the author was in prison. Most of it is set in India and how he became part of it after escaping from a prison in Australia and overcoming heroine addiction. It’s book 2 of a 4 series tome and the book itself is huge! The book goes downhill after my favourite character dies.

Notes:
– There are ‘babas’ called the standing babas who’ve been standing for years and at one point because of the standing their legs swole up to huge stumps from the blood flow.

– Lepers dealing in black market medicine.

– Indira Gandhi assassination

– The Ultimate Complexity – The universe began in almost absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex for about fifteen billion years. It is always getting more complex. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. We might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet might not get there, to that ultimate complexity. But we are all moving towards it — everything in the universe is moving towards it. And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to, is what I choose to call God. If you don’t like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it.

– Measurements of the meter has to do with the distance from the equator to North Pole.

Table of Contents
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Acknowledgements