Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am consistently amazed by the rave reviews for this overlong, tedious and egocentric book. Gregory David Roberts broke out of jail and spent 8 years in India- and it seems he spent most of that time watching Bollywood movies and imagining himself as one of their musclebound superheroes. Anyone familiar with Hindi cinema staples will recognize all of the usual ingredients here- a tough anti-hero with one foot in the slums and the other in the glitzy underworld of organized crime; the mysterious heroine with a secret life; the over the top action scenes; the bullet riddled character who returns from the grave in the final act; a character who turns out to have an evil twin and the sudden surge of mother love that sets the anti-hero on the road to righteousness. Heck, he even writes in scenes in which characters spontaneously burst into song. The same kind of stuff can be consumed on the screen in an hour or two, without having to wade through a massive missive the size of an average edition of the Bible. Not only does Roberts expect readers to take this recycled Bolly-waffle as an original story, but he also wants us to swallow it as an autobiography. The self egrandising tone is pretty hard to take- there are repeated descriptions of himself as both a "hard, muscled tough man" and a "sensitive intellectual activist". In addition to rescuing countless helpless slum dwellers, becoming a doctor, battling Rambo style in Afghanistan, surviving a prison tourture sequence so elaborate it seems lifted from "The Passion of the Christ", saving white babes from sexual slavery, kung fu fighting a pack of wild dogs and becoming a kind of Bombay Don Corleone, Roberts also finds time to slip "the meaning of life" ( a kind of masala mix of Hinduism and Stephen Hawkings) into a single chapter. This book is dreadful, and the worst thing is that some reveiwers have touted it as a great book about India. This is an Indian story in as much as Tarzan was a great African story or "Dances with Wolves' was a history of the Sioux Nation. India, and Indians are pretty much window dressing to Roberts boy's own adventure here. If you want to read about India, read some Indian authors like Raj Khamal Jha or Amitav Ghosh.. If you are interested in a foreigners experience of Asian cultures, check out David Mitchell... but if you want trash like Shantaram, rent a copy of Bollywood cheese like Mission: Kashmir, it will waste a lot less time than this...