Homepage - Introduction

The photo shows some friends and me on a bike run in Bombay that raised money for an outstanding charity in the city, the Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust. You can find them at www.sankalp.org.in. Take a look. I’m sure you’ll see that the work they do is so important that you’ll want to help them.

People very often offer me money, when I’m doing speeches or when they write to me, to help me with my charity work in Bombay. I don’t take money. I do everything from my own pocket, and I don’t ask for or accept a dollar from anyone. But SANKALP desperately needs your money, and I urge anyone and everyone out there who responds to my novel from the heart, and wants to give something, to give it to SANKALP.

The astoundingly inspirational founder/director of SANKALP, Eldred Tellis, who has established support programmes for addicts in prisons in Afghanistan and Iran as well as in the secret lanes and gullies of Bombay, will feature as one of my heroes on the People Links page in coming days. Here are two pictures of Eldred Tellis in his office at the addict rehabilitation centre near the Haji Ali Shrine.

Eldred Tellis

NEW ON THE SITE TODAY

I've made a change to the Your Say section of this site. I've decided to take out the examples of emails that I receive from you, my readers. I receive hundreds of emails every month, and although it's impossible for me to reply to them all, I do read them all carefully. The problems with quoting from emails in the Your Say section are: a) that it's too selective, and not very fair, to pick some emails over others; and b) that many of the most profound messages I receive are extremely private, and couldn't be reprinted on the site. To give you an example, quite a few women - and some men - have written to me about the fact that they were sexually abused by someone who was in a position of trust and responsibility over them. The fate of my character, Karla, although fictional, has acted as a catalyst for these readers to write to me. I would never put such letters on the site, but the issue they raise is so important that I think it should be discussed.

So, I've decided to address themes that you, my readers, raise with me in your emails - but without reprinting your emails. The first issue I'll deal with is one that is raised by readers in their emails to me at least once a month or so: the issue of Capital Punishment. Most of the emails I receive on this subject come from readers in the USA, where people they know, or campaign for, are on Death Row, awaiting execution. The issue has a wider relevance than the USA: China, for instance, executes almost as many people each year as the rest of the world combined, and Capital Punishment is still practiced in many countries across the world.

That first discussion of a theme raised by Your Say, that is by your emails to me, appears on the site today. I hope that in time, the themes raised, and my responses to them, will provide a body of reference articles that you, my readers, can use as you please, quoting from them whenever you want.

For various reasons, too trivial and just plain sad to mention here, I wasn’t able to update my website for quite a while. It troubled me deeply – all the more so because I received so many hundreds of emails from people who’d visited the site and found nobody home, so to speak – but it couldn’t be avoided. Fate does that sometimes, as we all know: puts something just within your reach, and tells you that you can’t have it.

But now, I’m back on-line and talking with you all again. And what a damn nice feeling it is, to be back home in my own website again.

First, please let me say to the thousands of people who write emails to me that I DO read all the emails, but it’s simply impossible to respond to all of them. On average, I receive between 800 and 1,000 emails from readers every month. I’m very pleased to hear from my readers, and always read what they say, and I’m always grateful to have the feedback. But if I replied to even a half of all the emails I receive, I wouldn’t write anything else – and I do get a lot of emails from readers who are urging me to hurry up and get the next novel on the shelves of the bookstores. So, what I’ll try to do, from now on, is to address the main points that readers raise with me by writing about them here, on the website. Please keep on writing to me, and keep visiting the site to find the answers to the questions you’ve raised.

Second, I’d like to let you know about some changes I’m making to the website. One change is that I’m deleting the “Character Profiles” section. When I created that section of the site, I had hoped that it would lead readers deeper into the understanding that the characters in my novel, Shantaram, are just that: characters, and not real people. In fact, the opposite has been happening. Many readers are writing to me for information on where they can get in touch with Karla or Abdullah, for example, and asking me about their lives after the events mentioned in the novel. I’ll say this now for the record, and go into it again in more detail in other sections of the site in the next few months: all the characters in my novel are created characters, fictions, invented by me, and none of them resemble living persons in any way.

It’s a funny thing, how people react to the “discovery” that Karla and Prabaker, Abdullah and Khaderbhai, Didier and Khaled Ansari and all the others are created characters, and not real beings. As a writer, writing and creating characters all my life through 40 years of work in novels, short stories, novellas, plays, film screenplays, and essays, I know that one of the most difficult elements of the art is to create characters so real that people want to believe they ARE real. It’s something we all strive for, and seldom achieve. As a writer, I would expect that readers might react by saying something like this: “Wow! You mean, Karla, Prabaker and all the others aren’t real? Damn! That’s good writing!” And to be fair, that does happen, sometimes. But much more often, readers are stricken with disappointment when they learn that all the people they’d come to know through the novel are created from my imagination.

I understand the thoughts and emotions involved. The novel is so closely linked to the real experiences of my life that people read the book as autobiography, rather than as the novel that it is. The rule of thumb for Shantaram, and for the sequel, which I’m completing now in these months, is that the experiences are all real, taken from my own life and direct personal experience, but the characters and the dialogue and the narrative structure are all creations. I gotta tell ya, dear Friends and New Visitors, that it’s a strange thing, a strange, double-edged sword of a thing to have readers utterly convinced and committed by your creative art, and then disappointed by the same creativity at the same time. I hope, if readers pick up and read the sequel to Shantaram, that they’ll find all the new characters left standing at the end of Shantaram just as fresh and alive in the sequel, and in the company of a whole new set of characters to know, and love, and revile, as the case may be.

The “Character Profiles” section of the website was supposed to make all of that clear, but it didn’t. So, I’ll delete that section from the site and devote more time to other sections.

Another change will be to the “Coming Events” section of the website. I anguished long and hard about this section of the site, and put it in there very reluctantly, after some pretty hefty and persistent persuasion from friends and writer colleagues. But, you know, I just don’t (and never did) feel comfortable with a chatty section about what-all I’m doing and where-all I’m going. I mean, who gives a damn? It doesn’t matter what a writer’s doing or where’s he’s going or where the hell he was last week. What matters is what a writer WRITES, and if the writer has something to say (which isn’t all that often) then it also matters what a writer thinks. But that’s it. How the writer passes his day, or where the writer is gonna be next week doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this world (a writer said that, in one of my Top Ten movies), and I don’t (and can’t) feel comfortable about writing it down.

I’m not passing judgement here: this is a personal reaction, with no implications for others. If other writers, or anyone else in the cybersphere for that matter, want to let people know about their last visit to Tesco or Migros or The Bahamas, hell, I’m happy for them. I’m not making a comment about what other people write on their sites or in their blogs. Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend, as the clearly insane but disconcertingly rational Mao once said.

So, I’m changing the “Coming Events” section to just “Events”, and I’m inviting you all to send me YOUR events, so that I can put them on the website. If you know of something humane, happy, creative, fair, honest, and positive that’s happening in your neck of the cyberspatial woods, then let me know, and if I can get the time I’ll put it on the site for others to know about. Okay?

One last note to all the readers who are fans of the philosophy seminars before I sign off for now: I’ll have an announcement about the Philosophy Seminars in the next update, which should be no later than the 5th of February, so check in on or after the 5th if you’re interested in that branch of the intellectual tree.