This is why isolation is used as a punishment. One of the main causes of anxiety and depression is an inability to be serene in the isolation of our own company.

It brought me to a much more honest appraisal and understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, and acceptance of my own responsibility for the suffering I’d inflicted and endured, and allowed me to become comfortable in my own skin. I was fortunate to have had that time in isolation. I spent three and a half years of my life in solitary confinement - 1,320 days and nights. Isolation is a new experience for the world because of this pandemic.

I’ve gone through many changes in my life, and have worn many different uniforms, but this is the last change for me, and it’s probably a return to something I once knew and didĮdited excerpts from an exclusive interview via e-mail from Jamaica:.

When I go to an airport or to a public place I wear a shawl, out of respect for others, but it comes off as soon as I leave.

The malas that I wear are gifts from my spiritual teacher, and that’s all I like to wear on my upper body. Once again, I don’t know why, but I simply can’t feel comfortable in shoes of any kind. At the beginning of the fifth year, I stopped wearing shoes.Everything I wore felt like a uniform of some kind. At the beginning of the fourth year of devotion, I couldn’t tolerate the feeling of a shirt on my back. I think I may have done it in a former life. At the beginning of the third year of devotion, I put the tika on my forehead every morning. Seven years ago, after years of instruction from my spiritual teacher, I decided to walk on the spiritual path.Love&Faith, co-produced with Dale Virgo, releases on December 4. In 2018, however, he started writing new songs. Hailing from a family of musicians, Gregory gave vent to his feelings through rich lyrical content during his imprisonment, but never recorded those songs. The book, which chronicles his days in Mumbai, sold more than six million copies worldwide, and was published in 41 languages including Marathi. In 1990, he was captured in Germany and sent back to Australia, where he was put in solitary confinement. He was recruited for counterfeiting and forging passports, and then jailed in an Indian prison. In 1980, he escaped the maximum security Pentridge Prison and landed in India, where he made a home in Dharavi, Mumbai.

In fact, after he targeted a bank, a woman teller was quoted as saying, “He was so polite we wouldn’t mind if he comes back again.” And he did.īorn in Australia, Gregory, a former heroin addict and an armed robber was sentenced to 10-year imprisonment. He calls himself ‘the most incompetent criminal in the world’.Īlso known as ‘the gentleman bandit’, Gregory David Roberts admits he was so polite that often people didn’t realise they were being robbed.

Author gregory david roberts