review of Shantaram, the book

Shantaram is a roman-clef novel of Gregory David Roberts , a best seller and soon to be a movie with actors like Johnny Depp and Amitabh Bachchan. Eagerly awaiting the movie. Gregory David Roberts escaped from an Australian Prison and landed in India completely by chance and spent 10 years anonymously, his adventures and misadventures is what the book is about , however it has some elements of fiction, hence a Roman-a-clef novel.
The way the book starts hooks you to it . There is no escaping this amazingly written book after that.
His character in the book Lin says the one thing he had when he was being tortured in the Australian prison and an Indian one was freedom even though his body was chained and severely beaten. He says he had the freedom to hate the man who was torturing him. He chose to forgive.
The Book is huge, it is a 1000 page book and i completed this monster in 3 or 4 installments. But boy was it worth it, the story is no ordinary story and in GDR's own words
he knew even before the book began that it would be a movie. In the story there are many characters some real some fictional according to the author in an interview he gave
recently. But the best characters are his friend Prabhaker his friend , his guide to Bombay where he spends ten years in the book, Abdullah Taheri, henchman of mafia lord, the lord Abdel Khader Khan, Karla his love, accomplice, reason for his many trysts with many dangerous people of Bombay(Mumbai). These characters along with the main character Lin(author) make the book a journey that takes the reader to the heart of India, its people, its culture, to the Soviet-Afghan war in Afghanistan, from Australia to New Zealand, from Pakistan to Afghanistan and back to India where Lin knows he belongs as soon as he sets his foot on India. Landing in India as transition to catch another flight, he actually tore the ticket when he landed here.
According to me the best part of this completely engaging book was when he spends 6 weeks in an Indian prison, of course the prison is far worse than the Australian prison, not just that, GDR describes the experience in such detail that i felt like an inmate!. He says that in a prison, world becomes raw and real to the true sense of the word, Respect means everything and if you are not respected you die, you have to earn your respect, unlike the outside world where respect has lost it meaning.

Shantaram the title has an interesting story too, he visits his friend Prabhaker's Village in India and Prabhaker's family treats him like their own son. They name him Shantaram which means man of peace, it is a different story that he is never around peace after that, but i felt he had peace inside him . I think we need to be at peace no matter where we are.
GDR says that he is writing a sequel and a prequel for Shantaram and we wait with baited breath.......