Gregory David Roberts [author]

By: Editor | August 18, 2009 | Ten by Ten

Gregory David Roberts is an Australian author best known for his novel Shantaram. The novel is a philosophical thriller based on Roberts’ experiences during his time spent living in Mumbai.  Roberts lived in Melbourne, Germany and France, and finally returned to Mumbai, where he set up charitable foundations to assist the city’s poor with health care.

Walk us through your most colorful childhood memory.
On the same day, I was lifted by one arm into the air by a Catholic nun — the action dislocated my shoulder, leaving a permanent injury — and beaten by her with a wooden stick until my legs ran with blood. My mother, in an attempt to take my mind off this extreme punishment, took me to an exhibition later that day of handwritten manuscripts by the greatest living Australian writers at Melbourne University. In fact, in the wonder and beauty of those written works, I did forget the pain. And I knew — I was 5 years old — that I was born to be a writer.

What is the strangest number you have programmed into your phone?
None of the numbers in my phones are strange. From direct numbers for Nelson Mandela, Johnny Depp, Josh Brolin, Madonna and Richard Branson to the number for the man I employ as an animal welfare officer in the Bombay slum where I lived; from the causes I represent as an ambassador, such as Doctors Without Borders and The Heart For India Foundation, to the former mafia associates who work for the poor in my own Bombay charity, the Association of Retired Gangsters and Outlaws, my phone list represents the richest people in the world and the poorest, the old and the young, the wise and the wanting, the weak and the strong. The numbers stand for people, and we are none of us — no matter how lost or how elevated in the eyes of others — strange people.

Describe your closest brush with death.
I’ve been stabbed three times, blown up, struck in four places by shrapnel, shot at six times, starved to half my body weight, trampled by a rioting crowd in Kinshasa, attacked with clubs, iron bars and machetes, tortured by prison guards for information, and hit fairly hard in the head and body in more than 300 fistfights. They were all pretty close brushes with death.

If you could choose any five people, dead or alive, to have dinner with, who would they be and why?
My family, of course. First of all: my wife, my mother and stepfather, my daughter, my son, and my brother (that’s six people, but they’re family, so nobody gets left out, na?). However, if the question refers to people NOT in my family and we all get to use a universal translator to understand one another, then it would be, in chronological order: Gautama Buddha, Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, Shakespeare and my friend Madonna.

The Buddha for his compassion and understanding for those who fall or fail; Cleopatra for her understanding of what it is to be doomed and damned, and because I love powerful women; Jesus for his mystical passion; Shakespeare for the rapture of his language; and Madonna for her beauty, her cleverness and her matchless sense of play.

What do you consider your greatest failure?
To have lost my honor in crimes of violence that put fear into others.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
As an artist, the novel Shantaram.

What is your most cherished possession and why?
I don’t cherish possessions; I cherish people. I do take some delight in certain possessions and they include: everything ever given to me by my wife, Princess Francoise; a quartz crystal given to me by my daughter from her trip to Nepal; a Venetian-glass figure given to me by my parents when I took them to Venice; and a song written for me by my brother, the composer Nick Smith.

How will you spend this evening?
At 5 p.m., I’ll stop writing for the day and hit the gym for 45 minutes of boxing and weight training. At 6 p.m., I’ll return home, take a shower and run a bath for my wife filled with four of her favorite perfumed crystals. When my wife returns from her work as CEO of two companies, I’ll cook a dinner for us — penne arrabiata — and have it on the table for her when she emerges from the bath. Over dinner, we’ll debrief each other with all of the day’s decisions and new information, and after dinner we’ll work together for an hour or so on one of the many creative or charity projects we have boiling away on all the burners; then we’ll phone loved ones for half an hour; and finally, we’ll watch a movie — usually one featuring one of our many actor, director or producer friends.

Describe a vivid or recurring dream you’ve had?
A dream that recurs fairly often is of a future world where people relate to one another with tenderness, kindness and compassion, and where the common goal is to learn all that we can about ourselves and our place in the universe. Our species has the capacity to visit other Earthlike planets and terraform them into life-sustaining bodies. In this dream, I am working with a team of philosophers and writers who have been tasked with collating new information and finding common threads or emerging patterns. The work is extremely exciting, and all of us have the distinctly rapturous sensation that we are on the brink of profound and transformational understandings that will help all of humanity. In this dream, we communicate with words for the sheer fun of the language, but we are all linked telepathically to one another, and we know everything that there is to know about one another.

How would you define love?
Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own. Any definition of love must be broad enough to include all the many and varied forms of love, from the love of parents for children to the kind of love that keeps poorly paid researchers struggling to find a cure for a communicable disease; from romantic love to the kind of love that keeps teachers working to bring new generations into the light of understanding.

My definition includes its essential elements for the following reasons:

“Passion,” because there is no love without passion: You can’t be half-hearted about love, because love is all or nothing.

The “search,” because love is an active thing, not a passive thing: You can’t sit around, loving things by intention — you have to get out there and connect in order to love.

“Truth,” because love is inextricably connected with truth: You can’t love something that is a lie, and you can’t love something with a lie.

And “other than your own,” because love reaches outward from within: The idea that we can love ourselves is solipsistic nonsense, in my view, because every act of love involves engagement and interaction with others, directly or indirectly. We can like ourselves or dislike ourselves, but it takes two — or many more than two — to make love exist.

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