Took me a long damn time to finish. This book was good but I would have really appreciated the version that was 60 percent as long. Mehta is writing about Bombay after having been raised there before leaving as a teenager for American and returning as an adult. He gets incredibly deep access into some of Bombay's key cultural institutions: the political parties, the mafias, and Bollywood, and interviews people all up and down the food chain in each, trying to sketch out what the city is like for the millions of people who inhabit it. The result is fascinating, but was a bit overwhelming for me -- most of the chapters here are 80 pages-plus long, and I frequently felt over-saturated with details about the inner workings of the police, Bollywood producers, "bar line" dancing girls, etc.

That said, there's a ton of fascinating information here -- I learned quite a bit more about the confessional conflicts in Bombay, principally between Hindu and Muslim inhabitants; the underworld of Bombay hitmen, corrupt cops and politicians; the world of Bombay's most impoverished, who live in shanties made of cardboard and corrugated tin; the world of Bollywood, both for those at the pinnacle and those struggling and failing to break in to it. It's a kaleidoscope of details that add up to a fascinating portrait of a city, but it's a bit of a slog along the way. I'd say if you're particularly interested in Bombay then give it a go.

one of the finest non- fiction that I have read. the whole mosaic of Mumbai comes alive in this book giving us the rare glimpse into the heart and mind of so many characters. the detailing in describing the every facet of the characters is of the highest order.

As a South Asian twenty-something who has lived in America her whole life (whose parents have now lived in America for more than half of their lives) and who doesn't speak any Indian language, this book felt like my eyes had finally been open. Neither of my parents are from Bombay, and in my visits to India, I have never been, but so much of what Mehta talks about extends beyond the city -- you can see and feel the people and the places that he so meticulously describes. The book is long, 500+ pages, and if you are unable to get through all of it, please see if you are able to at least the chapter titled, City in Heat. It is heartbreaking, thrilling, and beautiful. I can't wait to read more of Mehta's work.

I thought this book was great. Anyone interested in modern India (or not!) should definitely read it. It isn't dry, like some non-fiction books can be, it is written in more of a memoir form about his interviews with various people in India and his life since he moved back there. The contacts he was able to make were amazing! Head dons of the gangs in Mumbai, hired killers, dancers, movie stars, directors, police, anyone! All ready to tell him everything because he is a journalist. The first part was mainly about the riots in the 90's, it was the only part that I got mildly confused during only because every person involved had different accounts of it and the timeline jumped when he talked to different people.
He was very easy to read, his voice was very personable. Disturbing yet enjoyable all around.

The only real problem I had was that there were random pages that had been torn out of my book. People are annoying -_-

This is a book I shouldn't have read. But I did, and now I have to live with it.

I now live in Navi Mumbai - that's the area initially slotted for the expansion of Mumbai, later sabotaged by the bigshots and now just a satellite city of Mumbai. I came here six months ago, and I had grown to love the place. I had decided everything they say about Mumabi must be hype or slander - I mean, if Navi Mumbai is this good, Mumbai should at least be a shade better, shouldn't it?

After reading the book, I've slowly started to discern the undercurrents below what seems like a placid surface of the place where I live. I've grown to realize that once you decide to look purposefully, you'll easily see the real Mumbai, the one that casual observers miss. What I've seen frightens me. Now all I want is to finish my stint here and leave.

As for the book, it's well written and absorbing; but it's also quite slanderous - many of the people whom Mehta so intimately portrays have since turned against him, notably the director Vidhu Vinod Chopra.

All in all, a good read.

Suketu Mehta paints a vivid picture of the famed metropolis through the thought provoking stories of its inhabitants. Every character in this book leaves an imprint on the reader.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would certainly recommend this to anyone who's looking for an engaging non fiction.

Good anecdotes overshadowed by a pompous author

Great anecdote of Mumbai overshadowed by the authors extreme bias and judgemental attitude whuch drips off the pages. It gives you a general view of Mumbai and its inhabitants from gangsters to bar dancers. This book would have been great if the author, Suketu Mehta would have just told the stories without framing it in his own bias. Additionally, it was riddled with inconsistencies and grammatical errors.

I have stayed in Bombay for 6 years and still go there sometimes. My relationship with Bombay (do note I am quoting Bombay not Mumbai) has been a love/hate affair. Love because it never ceases to amaze me of the people who stay there, of the energy which is palpable in its very air. And Hate because the same reason of my love towards it- its so crowded! I have traveled the locals for 4 long years so I kind of understand the grim turmoil which will come into my life if I decide staying there. And I read this novel. Now I am pretty sure the next time I travel to Bombay, the lens I was wearing till now has changed to a distinctly technicolor one. Bombay riots, the politics, gang wars, police encounters, dance bars, underworld, bollywood, aspiring actors, Jain monks- reality has been never more enthralling as it is in this novel. I kind of hate reality, don't read the papers often for that very reason but then this novel made reality more romantic to me than any bollywood/hollywood romantic caper could ever possibly do. Along with these stories I also adored the way the author has gone about dishing them out. His thoughts, the way he has observed the characters, had tried to understand them so closely..that makes this novel unique. Through each of his stories the author has taken pains to understand why this character does what he/she does..what makes them so special and other-worldly than any other normal person. Read this book for a grasp of reality and be prepared to be completely shaken by it and after gathering senses, falling again in love with it :)

I rather haphazardly stumbled across Maximum City in an airport bookshop a couple months back and boy am I glad I did, because it perfectly hits one of my literary sweet spots: a fascination with modern cities. It's a well-researched and very detailed look at Bombay (or, as many call it now, Mumbai) as it exists today in all its tremendous beauty and unparalleled horror. Suketu Mehta has a wonderful talent for downloading a tremendous amount of information while also writing utterly fascinating narratives about the various people and dynamics at work within the city. Along the way he relates the experience of returning to his home city after spending much of his childhood and young adulthood in America and Paris. It's a read that's really hard to put down.

I do wonder, however what other Bombay residents would think about this book, as it tends to focus on the darker forces at work within the city, such as the ethnic conflicts, ongoing gang wars, and the barely-kept-under-wraps illicit sex trade. All of this stuff is fascinating in much the same way as a horror film or roadside accident, but does it paint a "true" picture of the city? The answer is probably that no single book can capture the complete essence of any urban environment, but this one certainly fills in a lot of gaps that won't be covered in your usual travel guides.

This is one of the toughest books I've ploughed through. That's because every page I turned just ended up increasing my irritation with Suketu Mehta. Let me say this upfront: this the most hypocritical, sanctimonious, pretentious purported writer I have *ever* come across, and Mehta's voice throughout this book disgusted me.

Perhaps even more important to state is this: that this book is potentially dangerous.
To an uninitiated reader, the misrepresentations, and biases (glaringly obvious to me) of the writer would amount to a warped, if not completely wrong, understanding of Mumbai as a city, and even the country as a whole. More on that later, as it will need examples from the book to illustrate the point (yes, this is going to be a *long* review, but I just needed to vent..)

I picked up this book because it seemed interesting: who would pass up a chance at discovering more about a city as vibrant and diverse as Mumbai? And the book comes highly recommended, with so many reviewers heaping praise on Mehta for making "non-fiction seem as interesting as fiction" (this is true, but that's mostly because that's precisely what he *tries* to do in his book)..



Right from the beginning, his condescending tone hits the reader. Along with his complete confusion; he just doesn't know what he wants! He returns to Mumbai from New York, in search of the city he grew up in. This kind of nostalgia could have been endearingly naive. The problem is the sneering outsider's tone he adopts upon his return: the constantly whining, patronising tone. It really is all-pervasive, that persistent note of complaint, running through over a hundred pages of print! You feel like shaking him, demanding to know why he came back to Bombay of all cities, if he was going to get all delicate and fragile and do nothing but complain about the place.
He doesn't know what he wants for his children. He is stuck in a time warp - of the city as it was when he grew up in it. He wants his son to have exactly the education he had while growing up. But his son doesn't fit in, so he complains about his son's school, about the parents of other children studying in that school - because they weren't "inclusive enough".
Subsequently, when it emerges that his son is happier in an expensive school, studying with rich kids, that is a cause for complaint too, because now his son would go on "..to join the ranks of boys that looked down on my younger self."
Nothing can make this guy happy.

As he's worrying about his son growing up looking down on a certain section of society, he displays rank hypocrisy with his own elitist attitude towards Marathi speaking locals:
"..another world whose people came to wash our clothes, look at our electric meters, drive our cars, inhabit our nightmares. . Maharashtra to us was our servants, the banana lady downstairs, the text books we were force-fed in school. We had a term for them - ghatis.. also the word we used, generically, for 'servant'. I was in the fourth standard when Marathi became compulsory. How we groaned. It was the servants' language, we said..."

This elitist behaviour of Mehta's is fine, because who cares about the Maharashtrians anyway, right? But the thought of his son looking down at the kind of kid he used to be himself, the slice of society that Mehta himself had belonged to, now THAT was truly worrying [sarcasm alert]!



Mehta does not seem to be able to identify with ANY class of society, let alone with humanity at large; he merely finds fault with them all, mocking their lifestyles and thoughts with what he assumes to be witty sarcasm. It comes across as empty clamour for attention.
He sneers contemptuously at the rich, their parties, and their lifestyles. He looks down on the poor, cringes at the squalor in which they live, not because he feels sympathy for their predicament, but because he feels disgust. He distrusts them, often implying his low opinion of their behaviour.
As for the middle class, he can only refer patronizingly to them, ridiculing their beliefs and way of life, believing himself to be superior somehow, and a class apart.



And I found the language insufferable. Let me illustrate with an example. There is a line "..given all that up for this fools' errand, looking for silhouettes in the mist of the ghost time."
Really? REALLY? What does that even *mean*? It doesn't even sound one bit artsy, or poetic, if that's what he was going for. Neither does it sound like clear intelligible English.
And the book is full of such attempts at sounding poetic or deep.



Coverage of the Bombay riots is patchy, and partisan. Many lives were lost, and the story can be given any kind of spin the writer wants, merely by selecting what one decides to narrate. There are so many stories of atrocity on both sides. But the impression that comes across while reading Mehta's carefully picked stories, is that of a writer attempting to project himself as that sensitive thinking individual, replete with all its holier-than-thou-ness.
The topic of Hindu-Muslim riots is provocative enough without Mehta resorting to theatrics to grab readers' eyeballs, and more dangerously, their imagination. His prose is needlessly polarising, instead of even attempting to be matter of fact; which is what any unbiased writer would strive for. Sadly, however, Mehta does exactly the opposite, resorting to needles and excessive dramatisation of every instance. He lends religious and political colour to otherwise neutral statements, referring to a cry of "Bharat mata ki jai" as being "..in praise of the Hindu country".
Overall, that chapter gives the reader an overwhelming sensation that this is all about the writer, about how he's trying to project his own image, how he resorts to cheap theatrics to try and keep gullible readers hooked to his story. Because that's exactly how it reads: like an action novel whose storyline has been scripted to polarise the reader, not like a non-fiction book supposedly presenting a neutral fact sheet of events.



Then there's more misrepresentation and hypocrisy in Mehta's depiction on underworld gang leader, Chotta Shakeel:
"Chotta Shakeel, the operational commander of the Muslim gangs, is doing what the government has failed to do. He is extracting revenge for the riots. He is going after people like the ex-Mayor, Milind Vaidya, who was named in the Srikrishna report for having personally attacked Muslims. Shakeel is consulting the report; he is the executive to Srikrishna's judiciary."

Just this much, and no more. To a reader unfamiliar with India, or with Mumbai, this would make Chotta Shakeel seem like an eastern cousin of Robin Hood, or a vigilante, meting out justice where the law of the land fails to deliver justice.

Mehta fails to give the most rudimentary introduction to who Chotta Shakeel actually is: one of the closest aides of Dawood Ibrahim, who needs no introduction, being among the world's most dreaded criminals.

[It was at this point that I decided I would skim through the rest of the book, not read it through. That this book did not deserve the respect of being taken seriously. Honestly, it doesn't even warrant the time taken to read it, but I have my own compulsive I-will-finish-this-book-I-started issues I'm still grappling with.]



Everywhere possible, Mehta indulges in Hindu-bashing, relevant or not. Take for example this discussion on renting an apartment in Mumbai, and the concept of a paying guest:
"There are three personal gods that every Hindu is supposed to revere: mother, father, guest. There is no category for 'paying guest'.."
This sticks out like a sore thumb in a discussion which, until then, was exclusively about the concept of paying guests and the problems they face. You're left wondering how religion suddenly leapfrogged into the picture.

There's (obviously) more fiendish regionalism from Mehta when he describes the changing of "Bombay" to "Mumbai":
"In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn't afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy our road signs."
What does he even mean by "not being able to afford to live on roads"? That sentence just makes no sense at all. All it does is betray his contempt for all Marathi speaking people, and expose his bitterness and small-minded regional bigotry.

There were many, many more such infuriating passages (if they irritated me this much, I don't even know how much they'd irritate Marathi people who bothered reading this drivel). But it wouldn't make sense for me to quote them all - I could rewrite the book itself..



The sad part is that this book *could have been* so engaging. Had Mehta tried to tie in the socio-political situation with the lives of the people he interacted with, mapped out the effects of economic changes on people's lives, it could have been very insightful. Instead, he frittered away all the resources at his disposal, playing fast and loose with journalistic objectivity in the process.

The later chapters actually cover some very fascinating topics, from encounter killings and the lives of Mumbai city cops to beer bars, and the lives of bar dancers there. Mehta has managed to learn about their lives to an extent that most people would not be able to. And things get interesting for a while.

But then, he gets back to his own self, in the chapter "Memory Mines", and his voice - familiar and obnoxious - washes over you once again.. And you just want to kill him all over again..

It may have been 25 years since he graduated from school, but he shows none of the maturity you'd expect from an alumnus of so many years, when he goes back to his school. His school-boy's resentment disguised as contempt for "toppers" is amply showcased in his hateful passage on state-examinations:

"..Shortly after the state examinations were out, the photographs of the toppers would appear in the newspapers, in ads for the coaching classes where they had toiled night and day. They wore thick glasses and looked enervated from frequent masturbation. . None of them were smiling at their triumph. They didn't look like they'd smiled in a month. And they were almost all of them destined to be parked on bureaucrats' chairs, in government and in corporations, to make life hell for all the rest of us who goofed off in school, went out dancing, and generally had been arousing their envy from kindergarten.."

Now, if THIS passage coming from someone 25 years after they've left school isn't hateful and immature, I don't know what is.


Mehta goes on, in his last chapter, to discuss a Jain family who takes "diksha". But by this time, I was just waiting for the book to end, so I could just go to sleep without my OCD consuming me about having left a book unfinished.
To sum up, I may have been irritated with authors before, but none have made me THIS ANGRY before, for the entire duration for which I was reading their book.
(OK, so Durjoy Dutta might be close competition here, but at least the nonsense he writes is fiction, it lays no claim to being factual. And, as an aside, in my defence, I only read the one Durjoy Dutta book because it was a birthday present!)

A fascinating book that was up for a Pulitzer but a very dense read that is by no means simple... but if you are looking for something about world politics or corruption this is great

This is an awful, shallow book. Quite honestly I couldn't get past the underworld part of the book. Suketu Mehta has made the most of his Bollywood connections. That part was such a hackneyed collection of anecdotes, all eerily similar to various scenes from much-watched Bollywood movies about the criminal element in Bombay. I question how much research Mr. Mehta has really done for this part of the book - apart from watching the aforementioned movies. Perhaps Mr. Mehta read one of the leading Indian newspapers during the time he wrote the book - but that's about it, for if he really did interview gang members and the lot, then, I must say, Mr. Mehta is especially poor at gleaning any new information or insights from his subjects. One word of advice for you, Mr. Mehta, stick to writing scripts for Bollywood movies, leave the true investigative non-fiction writing to people who are true to that craft.