A blowhard of epic proportions, is my final decision on this reporter turned criminal turned slick fantasy autobiographer who IMO has crossed yet another of his ethical lines. I’ve read a few books of this genre. All of them have slick agendas, mostly around controlling foreign perception of India’s culture and changing the way thingsare done in India, but this is the first criminally sick version of that genre I have read.
Those of us who are from the West and have been going to India for over 30 years, and have indeed started organizations to help refugees, and as such did actually live in the slums, put lives on the line to help, vetted with politicans(Indian US/UK etc. etc. are quite adept at taking bribes in exactly the same way for hundreds of years) and the United Nations for refugee help, and did this without joining the Mafia, or killing, or dealing drugs, or smoking pot or hash day in day out, recognize the types of events and even specific events of which this slick blowhard writes.
Without doubt all have run into the the way things are done in India, indeed all of Asia, or the world for that matter(it is no different in the US). But this guy displays in his story line a cheapness for human lives and human truth that is galling.
He has stolen the lives of others, the other real foreign and local heroes, and pinned their medals to his chest. He has named the book after "his Indian given name" which is unspeakably megalomaniacal, and nothing a true Santaram would ever do.
Roberts, nee Smith, has a gift for the written gab, but by page 300, you become suspicious of the stories, by page 400, you learn to skip over the very "purple prose" where every description is obsessively laid out in "Mills and Boone"(English love novels for 12 year old girls).
All of us who did this work met in those cafes, restaurants, dhabas etc. and there were always the international cast from literally the entire world. There was also "the writer", incessantly eavesdropping, joining in, taking notes, and leaving many to wonder where those notes would end up. Some of my Enfield buddies know of this criminal, laugh their heads off, won’t go near the book.
His real discrepancieshowever are in his descriptions of the gunrunning to Afganistan. I am sure he was involved in the gun-running at some less involved level, and it’s real easy to get yourself in the range of a mortar shell without ever leaving India, but he has made some very obvious mistakes as anyone who had actually been at those altitudes and in those areas would know. It is clear to me asked his incessant questions of those who had been there, and then jut put themselves in his place.
There is a lot of danger in reading this book by those who have no idea, and take it as gospel because after all, what has he to loose, is his overhyped premise, and most of that danger lies in the escalation of terrorist acts within India, such as the horrific Bombay attacks. Think about all that when you read this book and how his depictions create chaos in that arena of violence. His pilferered philosphy, pilfered from no less than an American psychologist who was the father of hypnotherapy, and some say, NLP, was fed over and over again, and used to mesmerize readers into believing that whatever they do wrong, if it is for the right reasons it’s OK. Tell that to the dead in the Bombay terror attacks. He may run around like a man of peace now, but during his slum tenure, really good people flooded into India and spent their own hard owned honest money doing exactly, what he thinks is his Mother Theresa moment in the slums, and more.
You won’t hear about them in purple prose, because they are the real deal. We never do.
His "mental recovery" in the German prisons involved the type of psychological interventions used for addicts, and some have taken the precepts of that modality and twisted it to justify everything criminal. His complete and total disdain for law and order and his syrupy yet twisted rationale for justifying snubbing it is an affront to every law abiding person who takes the good with the bad, and mans up.
And that’s it, the bottom line is in the end, he really has not "manned up". Do not be fooled.
On a personal level, he displays a pathological conviction of his own extreme greatness, goodness and power, presented as "I am just a poor boy, my story’s seldom told"(Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer) - love for himself, the mobsters, then Bollywood, then India in that order. His defeats are really proof of his magnificence, and how can anyone take offense when he syrups it up with that purple prose of loving India more than any Indian does. Then he has the nerve to talk about his billiant idea for his "architecture" of the novel on his new website. Another stolen concept.
If he had distanced himself from this novel, and written the forewords etc. truth as to how he came about the stories he’s stiched together, my review would have been very different. The world does not need another international liar thief and murderer, and this book is ultimate the worst of "wrong book for the wrong reasons".
And by the way, Mr.Smith, there is no statute of limitations on murder in India. In the end, he is still a thief. A slick writer, but a thief. Come clean, O holy baba boooiee, you’re about to be hoist on your own petard.
PS I wonder how much he paid "Kishore" the real taxi driver, who apparently is till very much alive, for "killing him" in such a gruesome yet oh so Bollywood fashion in his novel. It is very bad karma to have such a story written about one’s living self, in the Hindu tradition, and very frowned upon, but what can a poor taxi driver do, when the neo-colonialists go at Indian folk again.