Shantaram Is Finally Coming

On April 27, 2007, the first paragraph of my post was:

"The book was calling to me from the cabinet in the big open breakfast room of the Chiengmai bed and breakfast. I opened the glass door and started reading the book with my breakfast. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.” After reading a few pages, I was done with breakfast and put it back into the glassed cabinet."

After a couple more breakfasts reading Shantaram, there was no way I could just put the book back

in the cabinet and wait until I could find my own copy.  I think I left another book in its place and then I wrote

"I’ve been living in parallel worlds - my ostensibly 'real' life and Roberts' India - almost a month now. [It's over 900 pages.] Flying back to the US from Thailand got me a long way into Roberts' world. By the time I reached LA, I needed to look it up on the internet. Was this fiction or autobiography? The morning after seeing Mira Nair’s The Namesake, I discovered Shantaram was loosely autobiographical fiction, soon to be a movie directed by Mira Nair starring Johnny Depp."

Soon.  I guess in movie making - especially big, sprawling films - 15 years is vaguely within the limits of 'soon.'  

Because Sunday there was an article in the LA Times highlighting upcoming films and series.  Shantaram was on the list.

 [Coming] Oct. 14

‘Shantaram’

Hollywood has been trying to adapt “Shantaram,” Gregory David Roberts’ sprawling, quasi-autobiographical novel about a fugitive Australian bank robber on the lam in 1980s Mumbai, for nearly two decades. First there were scrapped film adaptations starting Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton , then Apple revived the project for television. Now, after pandemic-related delays, a showrunner change and a production relocation, a 12-episode series with “Sons of Anarchy” star Charlie Hunnam in the lead is almost here. If the finished product is half as dramatic as the show’s backstory, viewers should be riveted. > Apple TV+

— Meredith Blake

So now I have to figure out how to watch an Apple TV series.