Customer Reviews

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It was with great delight when I found by accident this sizeable book on Bombaby. My delight only increased when I started to read. Suketu Metha was taking me into a world that I had long wondered about but had never been able to visit. His book, Maximum City, is easily the best book on 20th Century India that I have ever read.

It is not written as a typical travel book. The format is to take major aspects and dominant personalities of the city and give them each a detailed, richly woven chapter. You'll learn about the quirks and numerous pitfalls of Bombay housing and how the Renter's Act has made everything much much worse. You'll meet the head politician who seems to view Bombay as his personal fiefdom. You'll meet an amazing police detective who is unique on the police force in that he is the only one who won't take bribes, and you'll even sit in on a number of torture sessions of criminals. You'll meet a whole lot of people who kill people for hire, as well as members on police force who kill criminals because the courts didn't do their jobs of prosecuting them (that reality was drop jaw amazing). You'll meet some of the top women in the Bombay beer bar/sex scene, as well as an engineer who gave up a promising career to become a poet living on the Bombay footpaths. The list goes on.

As I read this book, I was amazed at the people that Metha got to agree to give him a good chunk of their time, allowing him to develop a vivid flesh and blood portrait. To top it off, he is an amazingly good writer, who has a great sense of humor (I guffawed out loud several times as I read this book) while casting an unblinking eye on filth and corruption so deep that you feel like you're going to choke on it.

Maximum City is truly a fascinating book to read. Anyone who is interested in either India or the phenomenon of the modern city can't help but love this book.

I actually agree with a lot of the reviews written on this book, especially in terms of the specifics they have captured on what works in this book and what does not. The purpose of this review thus is only to either reiterate the key points briefly, or to add a couple of new ones.

0. Context setting: I lived in Bombay for 6 years, hope to never live there again, but am fascinated by it, and can't read enough about it. I wasn't directly exposed to either the underbelly or the glamour of Bombay, but was definitely aware of it - something you can never avoid if you live there. My perspective is thus much more middle-class, which I think would be the broadest perspective on Bombay.

1. Bombay is a city begging to be written about, and despite the almost sudden rise in interest in writing about this city, there are still only a few one can really read, so Suketu's attempt is a welcome addition.

2. Suketa's heart in the right place, but his execution is confused. He clearly wants to capture the heart and soul of Bombay, but seems to be limited by his obvious journalistic and dispassionate style. At times the city gets the better of him and he lets go, but not often enough. This is in my opinion is the biggest drawback of the book - it's just stuck somewhere in between an extended non-fiction journal piece and a string of stories linked together by the theme of a city.

3. The book is way too long. Enough people have already pointed this out, so I won't belabour the point, but really, the obsession with writing about the Mafia is totally tedious. If that was what the book was intended to be about, I would have no complaints, but it wasn't, and I think it's unfair to devote half the book (directly or indirectly) to this subject.

4. The author is clearly star-struck (film stars, political stars, underworld stars, you-name-it stars), which biases the content in the book and makes it disproportionately and painfully heavy towards the warped un-reality that stars live in.

5. The depth of exploration of various subjects is clearly inconsistent, with some being ridiculously long (refer 3 above), and some painfully short. I am not sure whether that's because of the author's biases, or because of the information detail he was able to elicit on various subjects, but irrespective, it leads to some frustration.

In closing, let me state that I recognize that this review sounds harsh, but it is not really intended to be, and is just meant to prepare you for the long journey you will embark upon. In the end, all the above notwithstanding, I would still recommend this book as a second or third one if you want to get to know, and I mean really know, Bombay. My unequivocal first choice remains Shantaram, a book which never misses the pulse of the city in its much longer 1000 page journey, and remains the ultimate paean to Bombay.

This is definitely not a tourist guide to the sunny and acceptable side of the teeming and monstrous city of Bombay. Suketu Mehta, an American transplant, decided to return to his hometown and investigate its endless and often horrific underbelly - the world that the vast majority of its inhabitants have learned to live in. Underlying Mehta's general coverage of poverty, overcrowding, crime, ethnic conflict, and black market economics are in-depth character sketches of people surviving the dark side of Bombay. My favorite portion of the book covers Mehta's time with a forlorn exotic dancer that he calls Monalisa, while he also delves deeply into the lives of crime lords, street thugs, a harried police detective, a budding poet living on the streets, and even a family of Jain monks, all of whom have stories that would rarely if ever be told in more upscale narratives. This all makes the book unexpectedly harsh, vulgar, violent, and surprisingly fascinating from a human point of view.

The only problem is that Mehta doesn't know when to stop, over-covering his subjects to the point of exhaustion, and occasionally going off on unfocused tangents, such as the story of his involvement in producing a cheesy Bollywood movie. The book mostly managed to keep me interested through all its 500+ pages, as Metha would eventually introduce intriguing new people or situations. But each chapter is usually way too long in itself, and sometimes it feels like the book will never end as you long for Mehta to wrap up one story and either get to the next or just bring the book to an authoritative conclusion. Mehta has created a highly intriguing book about an overwhelming city that would scare away the weak-hearted, but his prose tends to get overwhelming too. [~doomsdayer520~]

As a neophyte traveler to India planning my itinerary a few years back, I chose to limit myself to the Grand Trunk Road and at the time had regrets about having to bypass Bombay. According to author Suketu Mehta, it looks like my decision may have been inadvertently wise. His portrayal of this megalopolis and its inhabitants is fulsome but frequently bleak and sometimes stultifying. He offers an insider's view of Bombay in a way that makes you feel you are experiencing all dimensions of it, no small feat for a city that contains 18 million people. Of course, some of the details are on the sketchy side, but frankly the city is so overwhelming, I don't mind some of the book's more cursory aspects. After all, Mehta has the daunting task of encompassing the gang wars, the corruption, the poverty and the prolific industry known worldwide as "Bollywood" into a single tome.

The author paints an almost surreal picture of urban life there, but through his determined and often risky investigations, he is also intent on showing the layers underneath to provide the typical outsider a more comprehensive understanding of how Bombay has become so out of control. Mehta is particularly riveting when interviewing the rioters and hit men on both sides of the long-standing Hindu-Muslim divide that peaked with extreme violence in the early nineties. Promising to put their lives in the movies, the author extracts brutal yet fascinating confessions from people who murder for a living and trust no one. The tactic seems questionable, but the resulting confessionals are worthwhile. The other high point of the book is his first-hand account of the Indian film industry. Since Mehta himself is a screenwriter for a film highlighted in the book, "Mission Kashmir", he is able to extract some interesting perspectives, including his own, on the filmmaking process and the surrounding business and politics.

I would imagine a lot of what he writes will not be popular with native Mumbaikars (as they are known especially since the city's name changed officially to Mumbai in 1996), but it certainly feels real, especially as he expresses outrage at the tightening grip of the underworld bosses controlling much of the wealth of the city. In particular, Mehta paints an incisive portrait of Bal Thackeray, the city's uncrowned king who exercises unwarranted levels of power and influence through his political acumen and questionable ethics. Just by the startling revelations he gets, it's obvious the author is incurring a great deal of risk by uncovering Thackeray in this journalistic manner. At the same time, Bombay holds a strange fascination over anyone interested in Indian culture, and Mehta's writing will certainly satisfy those in need of his amazing insight. Despite all the travesties there, I actually never questioned Mehta's admiration for the city and those who survive living there day after day. So order up some vadapav and a masala Coke and be prepared for a dark journey. Needless to say, this is no Lonely Planet guide. Fascinating reading.

The book promised an exploratory anticipation of Bombay, India's commercial capital. This book promised to peel the layers of the city and reveal the real Bombay. And it did that to a great extent. You learn about the underworld and how vast their influence is. In India, the underworld is funded not much through selling drugs as it is through what an Indian would pay a mafia don to exact swift justice or have the don get the municipality to fix a pothole. Indian courts are backlogged to the tune of dozens of years. Getting justice through the penal system means waiting decades for a verdict that may not even favor you! So the quick way out is the underworld. The book is best when it traces the underworld's arch as it crosses the Indian Police Service, the Indian Penal System, Bollywood, the larger Indian bureaucracy that one has to wade through to get anything done in the country, and the communal divide between the Hindus and Muslims. The book bogs down when it tries to look too deeply at other social ills like Bombay dance bar girls and their private lives. The last chapter of the book appears to have been added simply to pad the number of pages; it describes in detail the journey of one Jain family as it renounces the commercial world in search for a spiritual one. While marginally interesting, I had no idea what this had to do with discovering the city itself. Portions of the book could do with some crisp editing, especially the latter half of the book.

This is one of those books which you can either read or skip and not be disappointed by either choice.

Travel books are usually crisp but 'Maximum city' feels overloaded with prose. Unless you have a more than passing interest and knowledge of India, many passages will be unintelligible. Many chapters start well but they go on and on...and you feel like stomping your feet and shouting 'alright, we get it, now move on!'. Having spent a lot of time on the ground for this work, maybe it was natural that the author did not feel like leaving anything out.

Where Mehta shines is when he wears his journalist hat - his observations are spot on. He also does a great job of conveying the multi-faceted nature of Indian life - how can you explain a cop who takes great pride in not taking bribes but has no qualms about his subordinates emptying a bottle of concentrated acid into a man's body? The book also highlights the problems of rapid urbanization. When growth of a megapolis occurs without good supporting systems in place (and given India's pluralistic society), the inevitable result is chaos and this is conveyed very well indeed.

If I have a bone to pick, it is with the author's frequent use of raunch/sensationalism to keep the readers interest alive (anyone who has felt the tip of flame on one's skin knows what it is to burn someone alive...do you really need to read the step-by-step description of what happens when someone is set on fire? Or do you need to know how the innards of a cow look like when it is slaughtered?). Don't get me wrong - am not a queasy reader - but I feel that the author could have spared us the finer details because they contribute nothing to the book.

Having gone through the blurb and knowing the subject of the book, I expected a lot more. Three stars.

...trapped inside a 500-page book. Like the blurb says, Maximum City explores Bombay's underbelly, with stories of gangster life, the sex trade, the movie business, politics and other shady pursuits. It should have been a recipe for seedy fun, but sadly Mehta is that guy you get cornered by at the party. You know, the one whose anecdotes are a little too long; who forgets the punch line to the three-minute joke; who is interesting, but not quite as interesting as he believes himself to be. And my goodness, I don't even know who half these people are, but even I can tell that Mehta is dropping way too many names. Maximum City is full of bloated stories that would have soared at two-thirds the length. What with 18 million people in Mumbai you'd think Mehta could have found a good editor. I thought Maximum City was an interesting but flawed book. I'm glad it was written, I just wish it had been written a bit better.

This book was tailor made for me and I took it very personally. As a teenager brought up with Hindu middle-class values in a business family of the Bombay sub-culture, and then an NRI ever since I woke up to find out I grew a brain; I still have an intimate connection with the city in my personal and professional lives. The book was exceptionally cathartic for me and it was easy to identify with its stories. I share much the same frustrations and longing for my Bombay (now Mumbai) as the author, and empathize with the author's passion about the subject.

The personality of a city, especially Bombay, is best described in stories. Bombayites love to hear and tell stories about her people. Why else would Suketu Mehta write this book and why else would his interviewees recite their stories openly, both at great personal risk, unless they were all Bombayites. On the same note, Bombayites love him for writing this book.

The stories in the book and the book itself illustrates what all Bombayites know deep down inside. We are a city where people's law prevails, survival of the fittest is the law of the land and all moral/fairness judgements are based on class-based democracy. This fact determines all our risk profiles. Suketu Mehta has powerful friends. His heart is at the right place. Therefore, he's safe.

Suketu Mehta is not as much an intellectual economist as he is a homeboy with good journalistic skills. He picks some of the top macro phenomena affecting the city, and illustrates them through the micro view into lives and stories of the people who represent the phenomena. This writing style delves somewhere between non-fictional documentary and fictional novel. It alternates between using real and fictional names without full disclosure about when. Although the book is honest, factual and revealing: please draw your judgments responsibly. Doesn't that go for everything you see and experience in the world of Mumbai! After all, Suketu Mehta is part of the very system that he writes about, admittedly so.

The book is a snapshot of Mumbai in the 90's, and most (not all) things transpose across to the 2000's. It would make an "outsider" cringe and an "insider" gaze endlessly into the void. It makes for a good read along with the novel Shantaram. Be prepared though, both are fat books.

The strengths and weaknesses of this book stand out. For me, the strengths are more obvious. Mehta's writing style is clean and spare. He has a good eye for detail, and he fills this 542-page book with many, many details.

Mehta's descriptive powers are formidable. I can't recall when I've been more fixated by a passage than I was by his description of the slaughtering of animals. Sort of a literary Guernica. Prepare yourself for other forays into the realm of repulsion. Disgusting debris blows into open windows. Reaching down to touch a shoe, a hand instead touches vomit. On and on. After some passages, I was tempted to pick up Naked Lunch for a little light reading.

Given these strengths, the weaknesses of this book were slow to emerge. I had had trouble with some pieces along the way. The movement of Mehta's family to Bombay loomed large at the start of the book, but, except for needing family members at two or three points later in the book, Mehta lets them drop from sight. The treatment of the bar dancer was thin. Alright, she has trouble entering into loving relationships. Alright, everywhere Mehta goes with her, heads turn. Alright, she reconciles with her father.

But preceding the bar dancer had been the crime figures, who were scary and dangerous. I was scared of them and scared for Mehta. That was more than enough emotional engagement, and, in retrospect, the criminals, perhaps with the Indian film angle, would have generated a more coherent, satisfying book.

As I plowed on, I was increasingly frustrated by Mehta's shortcomings. I didn't understand his motivation for returning to his high school. I didn't understand the motivation of the wealthy diamond merchant giving away all--less a significant trust corpus--to become a Jainist mendicant. And, because of Mehta's ineptitude, I didn't care.

Spreading himself thin, Mehta reveals a bothersome superficiality. I guess my dissatisfaction came to a point when I read--smiling as I did so--on p. 473: "He cuts off his words, but the implication is clear: I am a foreigner. I cannot understand Indian customs. Here is the difference between us, out at last in the sunlight." Acceptable in the first 20 pages, this passage is laughable at the end of the book.

Maybe Mehta intended the loosely associated facts and details and narratives and descriptions to replicate the experience of Bombay. But I was disappointed to have gained no real insight into the characters on whom Mehta has focused or the personal journey of Mehta, and the book owed us one or the other.

The first 7/8th of this book was terrific with Mehta's intimate survey of mostly the seamy underside of Bombay: Hindu Nationalists/fascists, gangsters, murderers, courtesans, crooked (and decent!) police... even the Bollywood film industry gets examined - Bollywood appears to be far closer to organized crime than to Hollywood. The final eighth of the book kicks into overdrive, however, after Mehta declares that he's tired of talking to murderers and instead follows a wealthy Jain family to their complete renunciation of the material life, shedding all their wealth and possessions to become wandering ascetics with nothing more than begging bowls. This part of the story begins in urban Bombay as the family starts the process and culminates in an amazing series of ceremonies and celebrations in rural Gujarat, at the end of which 35,000 guests are fed, the ascetics distribute the rest of their wealth, have their heads shaved and hit the road with their begging bowls in hand. Wow!