Maximum City by Suketu Mehta.

As someone who spent a year growing up in Bombay (It was Bombay then), visiting often and having relatives there, much of this book read like Cliffs Notes for me. The few Bollywood Gangster movies that I have managed to catch over the years filled in whatever actually living there didn’t.

I also noticed that apart from a few details which are Bombay-specific, most of the themes are applicable to India in general. Reading about the way cops treat suspects, slums, poverty, red tape, politics etc. might have had a Bombayish spin to it, but all of that information was not new or particularly interesting to me.

As I read the book, I wondered why Sukethu had decided to follow the lives of these people, people whom you would not interact with or know in your day to day life in Bombay. The answer is buried in a paragraph in the last chapter of the book. I wish he had included that paragraph as a part of the introduction.

He goes on to present the rough edges of bombay, Gangsters, Bar dancers, Film Makers populate an assortment of characters, who as he puts it, have low moral values. The book is filled with sensationalism, repeatedly making you say “What the…” and it can get very monotonous. I wish he had spent a few pages writing about the Mumbaikar spirit of not letting anyone stop their daily lives. This was well-evident in the aftermath of the Train bombings.

As I crossed page 200, I was forced to come to the conclusion that the book was written for a western audience. Sukethu, I believe is picking out dramatic events in the city and serving it on a platter for the west to consume. It is like the TV producers from the west, who always manage to spend an extra few seconds to capture the slums of India, but do not bother thinking about the slums in America. He is pandering.

He also spends a great deal of time on BS from those he profiles. Often times, I have come across friends / relatives, who will talk about their aspirations, their plans for the future, with no solid intentions of ever pursuing them. We called this “passing time” and I get a feeling that Sukethu could not decipher the difference between it and a sincere commitment to change, well, that or he decided it would add weight to his already massive book.

There are a few good parts to the book. Although he name checks certain famous people across various professions, he does not hold them up on a pedestal or fawn over them as if they were demi-Gods; he tells it like he sees it. A lot of his theories were articulated well, I never had to spend time connecting the dots, because he did it for me.

His take on the rent act transforming itself into multiple forms of evil, historical details on Bombay’s immigrant population, on its smuggling trade and the perennial overcrowding, although deducible by logic, were well presented. The “theories” about Navi Mumbai, city planners and incubators for bad elements were well thought out, although I am sure that they will pass for gossip and just that.

Would I recommend this book to anyone?

I doubt it. A lot of similarly-themed movies have managed to “educate” Bollywood fans. Besides, and while I usually endorse “reading the book” over taking the lazy route with the movie, his writing style makes you wonder why you bought the book in the first place, so I’ll make an exception here. Thank goodness I borrowed it from someone, since it’s not something I’d keep on my shelves.

Like I concluded on SM, I am left wondering if Maximum City was just a collection of stories left over from a movie script. I’m not impressed, at all.

Here are some other bloggers who have reviewed this book.(1,2,3,4)

Looks like you've just discovered us. Add our RSS feed to keep up with the new posts.