Maximum City

How do you find words to capture a city's essence? Mehta took on this task with one of the world's biggest cities, Bombay, India. He lurked around the Bombay underworld, he skulked around the Bombay bar district, and he lingered among Bombay elite-turned-religious monks.

I ended up feeling much the way I felt after reading Dark Star Safari; that is, I've now been as close to India as I want to get. Like my visit to Africa through DSS, I understand the attraction, the desire to approach the intensity of life that can't be found often in suburban, safe America. Unlike Theroux and Mehta, however, I am happy to experience that intensity vicariously through a book.

Wow, people love this book, people hate this book! What a coup to have fawning quotes on the back cover from William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh and on the cover from Salman Rushdie. How could I not love this book? Mostly because it is 600 pages long!

Really it covers a huge amount of ground. The book is divided into three parts. Power is the first, and this part covers the topics of the authors personal geography and his mixture of Bombay and American lives; then goes historical with the 1992/3 riots and the 1998 elections, then the Rent Act before heading into a number of personal stories - almost character examinations - Bal Thackeray, politician; Ajay Lal (not his real name) Commissioner of Police; before interviews / interactions with various nefarious underworld characters - Moshin, Satish, Chotta Shakeel.
Part two, titled Pleasure where he touched briefly on food before another character session with Monalisa (again, not her real name) - a dancer and prostitute, other inhabitants of Golpitha (the red light district) including Honey/Manoj - a confusing man (with a wife) who dances as a woman. This leads into the Bollywood scene, where the narrative revolves around a large number of actors, producers etc in the industry, as the author becomes involved in co-writing and the making of a movie Mission Kashmir. This section is really convoluted and goes to too many characters - and I am not even sure how many are real and how many are false names.
The third part of the book Passages sees the author returning to his childhood school to be honoured, along with a number of his contemporaries for various achievements. This section tells stories of his childhood, childhood friends, and the bad old days. Two more character studies - Girish, who becomes an assistant of sorts to the author while researching his book. Girish, who lives with his family in a slum, have done well enough financially to move up in the world - to live in a cheap one bedroom flat on the periphery of Mumbai. The last character is Babbaji - a science student who left Bihar to become a poet, and live on the streets of Mumbai.

The themes running through all these stories are corruption, the greed of the wealthy and low value of the lives of the poor. If the book is to be believes, the criminal underworld hold so much power, and responsible for so much corruption and underhand dealing, it is a wonder anything at all functions in Mumbai.

For me, it got way too bogged down in two places - the politics, and the Bollywood people. I have not got a lot of knowledge about these aspects of Mumbai, and this wasn't a great introduction -it was way to heavy to quickly. Perhaps this book is targeted more at people with more prior knowledge in these areas, but then a lot of people who didn't like this book seemed to have experience in Mumbai.

It was an interesting read despite this, although it should have been edited down - about a third shorter by taking out some of the detail.

There were a number of well written parts, such as: P130:
The Rent Act was an institutionalised expropriation of private property. Democracies have a weakness: if a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books. This allows the perpetual continuation of the most absurd unreasonable practices.In America I can walk into a gun show and buy a hand gun for less than the price of a good dinner for two, even if I am insane or a convicted criminal.In Bombay I can walk into a flat I've rented for a year and stay there the rest of my life, pass it on to my sons after me, and defy the lawful proprietor's efforts to get my ass off his property. In both instances, I have the law behind me.The city is full of people claiming what's not theirs. Tenants claim ownership by virtue of having squatted on the property. Mill workers demand mills be kept open at a loss to provide them with employment. Slum dwellers demand water and power connections for illegal constructions on public land. Government employees demand the right to keep working long past when they're needed, at taxpayers' expense. Commuters demand further subsidies for train fares which are already the lowest in the world. Moviegoers demand the government freeze ticket prices. The Indian government has long believed in the unreality of supply and demand; what you pay for an item, for a food or for a service, has no relation to what it costs the producer.