I had no idea who this guy was either. And then I came across his interview on television and heard him talk about his life. What hit me first, while I listened to him, was a that a very very simple policy in life that I followed and believed, wasn't just another castle in the air built by someone as dumb as me, was reality.
Everyone deserves a second chance.
The story of his life caught up with me when he talked about his marriage break-up. The court trial that followed a while later for the custody of his baby girl was won by his wife who had walked out on father and child for another man when the baby was 3 and a half. 5 years, at the time the court handed custody to the mother, she clung to her father's leg outside the court wailing that she wanted to go home with him, she moved everyone's hearts including the policemen!
Gregory, went home and sat. Night fell around him. And marked the beginning of an end , the start of his heroin addiction. Having spent all the money he had drowning his grief in heroin, he started robbing. Banks, homes. He says he was called the Gentle bandit... 'cuz he looted banks with a toy gun he used to take his heroin, wore a three piece suit and talked calmly to the people, took only how much money was required, and never harmed anyone.
Soon, he was on Australia's Most Wanted list. He was captured and imprisoned in 1978. Was chained,beaten, tortured and not fed. He'd lost half his weight when he escaped the most tightly secured prison with the help of a motorcycle gang, BLF Union, & revolutionaries to escape to New Zealand in 1980.
I'm going to cut the story short here and quote him describe his life...
"I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country's most wanted man.
Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I set up and ran a free clinic in a crowded Bombay slum. I joined the Bombay Mafia, and worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And when those wilderness years of hunted exile came to an end, when I changed my life, when I stopped running onto the knives and started running into the light of love instead, I wrote the novel, Shantaram, that was based on my wild and wicked life."
Now,Gregory David Roberts, once known as Public Enemy Number One and Australia's Most Wanted Man, lectures on literature and art at universities, and teaches his philosophy and cosmosophy to students from every walk of life, including business leaders and creative artists in the fields of movies, writing, music, and drama.
While on the show, he was asked how different the under-world and the Mafia are today, when compared to the olden days when he was a part of it. He replies by saying, " There was integrity then. Yes, even among the gangsters. There were boundaries and lines which were never to be crossed."
When you see this man today, no one can ever think he is/was anything but what he looks like. Respectable and a man of integrity. When you hear him talk about how Bombay (now Mumbai), as he calls it, adopted him, you think of him as a man with passion. You cannot second guess the life he has been through until he tells you about it. And when he's told you his tale... You can see the scars that have been left behind. But you also see how they have turned him onto the right path, made him who he is today.You also see that your worst fears about everything and anything are true and not fiction. You also see that there are people who love and care about others, because they don't want it any other way,even today. After you've heard him talk it's hard to not let his experiences thaw at the cynic in you. Instead of losing faith in him and society, you find it. Faith in the world. Faith in him and in you.
THAT is all I have to say.
P.S: if u want to read up in detail about his "adventures"... I've mentioned a link. And read the book...!!
chippoxy doxy
what am I trying to say? I don't know. This Gregory fellow is interesting. Have a nice day. Hay hay hay. Make it while the sun shines.
Eeeeeee. (showing my teeth for everyone to see)
Kaushik
fever? "heart break?? u passed a test?? ur making me dizzy!
Baba O' Reilly by The Who. Listen to that and you'll forget about this gregory fellow and all..
Kaushik
P.S. Pk, take anti-dizzy medicine.
.... i dnt wann forget abt this gregory feeloww!!!!
..he's a superb guy.. and looks cute too.. he's got longer hair than mine...
...No medicine can help when u go on your happy-dizzy-nonsense-speres!!!!
hey preetika!
lovely, lovely post. i like your style.
especially the way you start and end things. "yes even i didn't know who he was" and "thaw at the cynic in you"
you know, i'm so much of a cynic too. its not like this post changed my outlook at the world and all...cuz tha's not bound to happen easily, or maybe not at all. but you have a point which you put across beautifully.
...hellos,
thank you very very much.. i'm not sure i deserve this much credit.. but thank you for taking the time to read this..
..everyone's got a cynic in themselves..i'm one myself, but towards myself...!!
thanks once again