Book Review – Jail Life Painful, but I Am Stress-Free: Subrata Roy

Having spent nearly two years in jail, Sahara chief Subrata Roy has released a book about coping with the crisis.

Subrata Roy, Chairman of Sahara Group. (Photo: Reuters)

Subrata Roy, Chairman of Sahara Group has been in jail for almost two years now. The embattled Sahara group chief says being confined to a prison cell with only basic amenities came as a “rude shock” and he has often wondered what “wrong” he has done.

“I, like any other human in confinement, could not contain my thoughts and at times felt an emotional outrage, ‘why me?’, ‘what have I done wrong to deserve this?’. Thoughts such as these often raced through my mind.”

The book titled Life Mantras is the first of a trilogy Thoughts from Tihar that Roy has penned while in judicial custody in Tihar Jail in connection with a long-running investor refund case, running into thousands of crores of rupees, with the markets regulator Sebi. It was released on Monday (1 February 2016) – on Sahara’s 39th Foundation Day and incidentally a day before a crucial hearing in Supreme Court

According to Roy, living all alone without any contact with the outside world would make people pull their hair or even go insane.

Do you know why such a person goes mad? It is because he has stopped getting food for his internal personality.

Subrata Roy, Chairman, Sahara Group

Roy said a better future can be chalked out by keeping the present in the right order, living the present and being grateful to God for what one has in the present.

“Do not worry about what happened yesterday; care for what will happen tomorrow; mend your ways today and the scars of yesterday will fade away,” the Sahara chief said.

While citing that when Sahara was started in 1978 with meagre resources of Rs 2,000, Roy said, “we were far happier then”. As per the book, the group is now worth Rs 1,80,000 crore. The book was unveiled today at 5,120 special public events organised across the country and abroad.