Maximum City

Genre: Non-Fiction / Narrative (tell me if there is better genre)
Writer: Suketu Mehta

A lovely book with some great narration. The writer talks to the set of people who essentially make up what we call the city of Mumbai.

One section of the book deals with the gangsters and mumbai police. Interviews and point of views is what makes up this section. The coldness with which people kill and the brutality of their everyday life perhaps numbs your senses so much that you wish they had a more personal aspect to the killings than just money. But that would be a filmy expectation I guess! There are some big shots names that aren't probably changed because we all know about them.

There is a section dedicated to the dance bars of Mumbai. The character of Monalisa, a bar dancer, is probably a very interesting one because of the various layers of her personality. The trans gender Honey is another well etched character.

The section where Mehta talks to the Shiv sainiks and its supremo is another one that probably had me hooked but yeah I would rather not go by a someone else's account of some person.

How can you talk about Mumbai without talking about Bollywood? There goes another section with some interesting anecdotes. Personally, I think this section is comparatively dry when compared with others because the personalities in this section are too predictable and already well dissected thru' the newspapers and media. I didn't want to know anything more about them ;)

Finally, spirituality comes into a picture as a very wealthy businessman decides to take Sanyas along with his family. This section is another good read.


If you think with so much information clubbed together this book would be boring, its not so! Somehow, the writer has captured Mumbai as she would have liked to be captured......lively! The first person narration, the characters being spoken to as if they were his everyday friends, anecdotes being shared - some of them what we have probably read in newspapers, all of these things make this book fabulous. The writer must have had the time of his life talking and interviewing all these people and getting to know their perspective on life, death, money and love.

Grab a copy, you should have it in your shelves....Its that good :)