Gregory David Roberts Biography

Hamsun escape to India, having served two years of imprisonment, the future author of Shantarama made a daring escape, which is described in the book. He fled to New Zealand, from where he flew to India on a fake passport. The new country accepted it and covered it from the law first at the Bombay Hotel, and then in the vast Indian slums. Now he has a completely different life, full of events, sometimes dangerous and incompatible with life.

Gregory Roberts in India, as the author later wrote in his book, was inevitable his acquaintance with the Indian mafia. However, our hero earned the respect of her leaders, as well as the respect and love of the simple Indian people with whom he lived in the slums. Using his knowledge, Gregory began to treat poor Indians, organized something like a field hospital in those difficult conditions.

The author also mastered the Indian languages ​​of Hindi and Marathi, spoke with the locals in their dialect, which caused admiration for many. The fact of the writer's participation in the hostilities in Afghanistan is known when he fought on the side of the Mujahideen. Gregory Smith did not abandon the criminal activity - he traded drugs, false passports, made fake money with Indian mafiosi, but at the same time studied spiritual teachings and practices, learned to meditate, thought a lot about his past life.

He fell in love with India with all his heart - its culture, people, places; He lived for some time in a small Indian village, where the locals sang all the time; He helped the inhabitants of the slum, lived with them side by side and even fought with the epidemic that suddenly flashed there, saved the Indians from the fire. Having lived at home for 10 years in India, having saturated it with culture and having established relations with the leaders of the Indian mafia, Gregory tries to earn, transporting heroin across the border of Germany.

In Frankfurt, he is arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for terrorists at home in Melbourne. Returning after so many years to his native country and ending up in a single chamber, a summer man rethinks his whole life. He constantly hears how his neighbor, a neighbor, at every opportunity, arranges fights with jailers and after that receives brutal thrashing from the guard, and offers him to help.

The criminal responded, and the writer began to teach him meditations and spiritual practices. After some time, this news scattered in prison, and other prisoners also joined these classes. Soon suicide and fights, attacks on jerpens, stopped in prison. Gregory taught criminals to curb their emotions, using meditation to cope with their own demons. For this prison overseer decided to thank the writer and offered him any thing to choose from.

Gregory answered Dostoevsky with the words of Dostoevsky that 15 years of conclusion is easier to survive with a pen and paper than 2 years without them. The prison administration gave the writer a pen and notebook, and Smith sat down to write a novel, which became a bestseller in the future.

He changed his surname to the pseudonym Roberts, abandoned bad habits and attempts to escape and decided to leave his term to the end, completely cleansing of the drug dope. The spelling of the novel by prison guards twice explicitly burned the thick manuscripts of the writer, but he did not give up. His goal to write his novel gave him strength. In the year, he left the walls of the prison, having served his entire term, and continued to work on the novel already at large.

Writing the novel "Shantara" took 11 years from the author. The writer Gregori Roberts, the published novel caused the effect of an exploding bomb. Millions of people read it, only in Russia did the circulation amount to thousands of copies. Instantly the book became a bestseller, and Roberts was already working on a new work called “Shadow of Mountain”. This is a continuation of the previous “Shantarama”, whose name is translated from Indian as “peaceful”, as called the author himself in India.

When asked how autobiographic his first novel is, Gregory David Roberts replies that the events are genuine, and the characters themselves are fictitious. For example, the prabaker, whom the author met upon arrival in India, was actually not at all a smiling, cheerful Hindu, but gloomy and gloomy. Shantaras many characters of different stripes and nationalities living in Bombay are mixed in the novel.

In addition to the main characters of Lina and Prabaker, there is also the lover of Shantarama, the Swiss by nationality of Karl, the tough but fair leader of the mafia Abdel Kader Khan, the American prostitute Lisa Carter and others. The very idea of ​​Shantarama is that pride is the main human vice, it is he who forces to suffer or to leave the life of the main characters, while mercy is the main virtue.

Because of their pride, Lin and Karl break up, Kader Khan dies, who wished to sit on a thoroughbred horse, and not on a camel, dies in Afghanistan. In the next work of Roberts, the “shadows of the mountain”, greed acts as a terrible sin, and the greatest virtue is generosity, it is written in a more ironic style.Although critics considered both novels by a certain symbiosis of Indian ideas about kindness, romanticization of criminals and concepts about ethical norms.

Personal life by the author of famous novels appears in a few of his photos as a tall, thin man with a long pigtail, which is imprinted either on the top on an expensive motorcycle, or next to a fair -haired woman. This is his second wife, whom he calls the princess and former wife of the heir to Romania. Nevertheless, they together and both deal with the problems of India, in which Gregory David Roberts now lives.

His chosen one Francoise Steurds is the president of the Hope for India, he himself is his employee. The author helps poor Hindu, former criminals and life abandoned in life in the “Happy Bicycles” created by him. He himself does not drink alcohol, drugs and does not even smoke. The author of Shantarama, instead of a slum, the writer now lives in Bombay, is friendship with Johnny Depp, dreaming of a film adaptation of his novel, and Madonna.

Relations with the writer's daughter were getting better. No more information about his life is known at the moment, since in the year he decided to leave public life, explaining this by the fact that he had already told everything to himself in his books. Indeed, the life of this unusual person, described in his works, makes us seriously think about many serious things.

His spiritual reincarnation was reflected in an autobiography with the simple name “Spiritual Way”, which he could not help but share with his reader. This book will help those who are now facing a difficult choice, will tell you where to find strength in order to overcome difficulties and find yourself. After all, the very fate of the writer is an extraordinary path to cleansing through all kinds of vices and temptations, and his spiritual power has been gained through simple human weaknesses.