Excerpts of Shantaram - The Book With Poetic Prose

       If you claim to have two passions: Books and Bombay...then you are supposed to say "I have read Shantaram" as a proof of sanctity of your claim. Never knew that prose can be as musical as poetry. A book that describes emotions so profoundly that you can see them unfolding right in your mind. A book that describes the city of dreams so vividly that you feel like you are walking in its streets.

        For those who haven't read  the book, here are a few sentences that really impressed me. These sentences are like the sapphires used in a terrific mosaic. Trust me, the sapphires will look far more beautiful when seen in the complete mosaic, still they are sapphires and they might add a spark to your eye.....

Describing Victoria Terminus, the iconic railway station of Bombay(not Mumbai)

• The great station – those who used it every day knew it as VT – was justly famous for the splendor of its intricately detailed facades, towers and exterior ornaments. But its most sublime beauty, it seemed to me was found in its cathedral interiors. There,the limitations of function met the ambitions of art, as the timetable and the timeless commanded equal respect.

Describing Indians:

• An Indian will be so pleased that if he likes something else about you- your eyes, or your smile, or the way you react to a beggar at the window of his cab – he will feel bonded to you, instantly. He will be prepared to do things for you, go out of his way, put himself at risk and even do dangerous or illegal things. If you have given him an address he doesn’t like, he will be prepared to wait for you, just to be sure that you are safe. You could come out an hour later, and ignore him completely and he would smile and drive away, happy to know that no harm had come to you. It is one of the five hundred things I love about Indians. If they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half.
• They were poor, tired, worried men, but they were Indian, and any Indian man will tell you that although love might not have been invented in India, it was certainly perfected there.

Comparing Virtue & Honor: 

• She had confused honor with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honor is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in honorable way - the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason - and you can enforce peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honor is art of being humble. And gangsters just like cops, politicians, soldiers and holy men are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

Describing What goes in Mind when death is looking at you in face:

• When you know you are going to die, there is no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow in end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom.

Random:

• The only force more ruthless and cynical than business of big politics is the politics of big business.
• Civilization after all is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.
• Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it.
• We can compel men not to be bad, but we cannot compel them to be good.
• Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell truth. 
• The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.
• When was the last time you ever heard a rich man throwing himself on the mercy of court?
• Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure not by what they can inflict
• If we envy someone for all the right reasons, we are half way to wisdom
• Fate gives us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we have loved them, left them, or fought them.