A great book , gifted by a dear friend that gives greater insight into a magnificent city . Some parts were so intense that it gave me short breaths . However some parts dissappointed me where the author's school days were described , kind of like dried leaves amongst lush greenery. I would have rather preferred to have a few pages dedicated to the famous dabbawalas , since they are part of bombay as much as dawood and the sena are. But on the whole one of the best non fiction books which clearly will make you fall in love with the greatest place on earth called Mumbai ..

As someone who grew up in the 90s in Mumbai, I lived in my middle class bubble, broken only by the riots and the rampant street sexual harassment. I watched the city take a rebirth with a new name, just one of a re-naming spree around the country. But though I knew that there were things going on, they were just somewhere out there and nothing to do with me. With Maximum City, Suketu Mehta brings those 'things' right under your nose making them hard to ignore.

Maximum City is about the shadow world of Mumbai, the place where politicians and gangsters, filmmakers and dance bar girls, the police and the public, all gather to feed off each other's negative traits. The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with power - namely, the hold of Shiv Sena, Mumbai's political and labour history, as well as the corruption in the police force. The Mumbai riots of 92 and the complicity of the political parties as well as the police was investigated and presented in detail. The gangsters, the gang wars, and their interplay with politicians and the police is also explored.

Then comes the pleasure section, where Mehta talks about the restaurant businesses, the dance bars, and Bollywood. Here, he takes up with a bar girl and develops a semi-crush on her. Hope his wife doesn't read this book! And finally, Bollywood and its struggles with the underworld and the government also makes it to these pages. There are a lot of other titbits in these pages as well. One of my personal favourites is about the Jain family which took deeksha together.

This was a fine work of investigative journalism and Mehta took risks as he cavorted around with gangsters and policemen. I read some negative reviews of the book by other Indians, and it was amusing to see how they were all about how Mehta was against Hinduism and India. Well, the underworld was strong in the 90s and there was religious discord. They were tough times. Deal with it! Living in an elite bubble doesn't make Mehta wrong or negate those lives which were lived under these circumstances.

Today, those dance bars are shut down, the underworld is mostly wiped out, and the 90s is long gone. I have also moved out. But more and more people still pour into Mumbai. The book should be of interest to anyone interested in Mumbai. Just remember that it's only one aspect of life in the city - the darker side. I keep wondering what happened today to these people Mehta chronicled in these pages. That speaks to the excellence of Maximum City. It made me care about the characters, real as they are.

One of the cliche books around Bombay/Mumbai. It could be that I feel it is a bit of an old hat since I have read books on similar themes the latest being "Shantaram".

The language is shorn of all elegance and eloquence and uses everyday English and most importantly the English dialect Indian readers are familiar with. Events, characters (fictional and some obviously not so fictional) stream in and out of the novel adding to the tapestry of a city torn between various halves. The book lays some overt emphasis to talk about split personalities - the Gujarati bar girl, or, the nerdy brothel surfing Reuters reading broker perhaps to put across metaphors of a city with an identity crisis.

The characters are fairly stereotypical and the flow of the book is similar as well. The saving grace is that it is well written (in terms of choosing words and structuring sentences) and that makes it a fairly fast read.

In the latter half of Maximum City, a man by the name of Babbanji is reported to have suggested naming this (then yet-to-be-written) book "Untold Life", saying that

There is plenty of discussion about the lives of the rich, but nothing is spoken about the lives of the poor.

That one statement accurately summarises the problem with Mumbai. It also capsulises the fault of this book, the least of which is that it ended up being named what it is.

It is perhaps my unorthodox approach to Suketu Mehta's oeuvre that has disappointed me, because I read his latest and most mature work, This Land Is Our Land, before this one. Nevertheless, I have several bones to pick with Maximum City — the book, shockingly, more than its namesake.

But first, credit where it's due: the portions on the 1992 riots, the Rent Act, Bal Thackeray and the underworld were genuinely interesting. However, I found the rest of this book largely composed of (sometimes) well-written but ultimately, awfully privileged drivel. Apart from the sections I just mentioned, this book offers nothing new whatsoever; much of it could be described as some sort of a PR stunt for the illustrious illusion that Mumbai maintains.

Throughout this book, I felt like far too much focus was put on things that already get more than their fair share of attention, be it Bollywood in general or Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Mission Kashmir in particular. The chapter, 'Distilleries of Pleasure' reminded me of how nauseating the Hindi film industry is, but that's a function Bollywood performs for itself every single day, anyway.

And then, there were the good ol' recurring irritants. Look, I get it. Mumbai is a very 'masculine' city, with its underworld and its capitalism, but that doesn't mean all its women are "bombabes" or bar dancers [at this point, if a less clichéd picture of women's lives in Mumbai is what you're looking for, you better head over to Hussain Zaidi's Mafia Queens of Mumbai instead]. In Maximum City, every time Mumbai deters from objectifying women, it is Mehta who (rather subtly) steps in. Worse, he brings in A LOT of Hindu thought and spiritual 'eloquence' into emphasising and emotionalising 'tradition' — an NRI, after all. His Bombay is a city of sex, violence and riches. Unsurprisingly, then, he starts a chapter called "Vadapao-eaters' City", by foregrounding himself and trying a vadapao to gain legitimacy. It's one of the shortest chapters in this nearly-six-hundred pager tome.

In one early chapter, Mehta writes

The First World lives smack in the centre of the Third.

In writing Maximum City, Mehta travels all the way from the very top of the First World — from New York City — into the First World within the Third, and not much beyond. All true significance, hence, is lost, and nothing of note is found.

Phew.. an excruciating read that compels your mind to wander rather than to stay focussed!

I did not know Balasaheb Thackeray was a fan of Michael Jackson, now I hate him little less. Ironically, Thackeray quoted that article 19-A, 'defines us all as Hindustanis', no wonder why they like violence because they do not care to read and make of everything whatever they like :p

The city of Bombay has found a sophisticated biographer in Suketu Mehta. Mostly people would remember Maximum city as a creative non-fiction; but for me, it has become an epitome of tremendously courageous journalism.

His breath-taking accounts of Jungle Raj by Shiv Sena, D-Company's Malacia, secret life of a call girl, a homosexual experiment of 'Honey', exquisitely refined life of Bollywood, and fearless story of IPS, (Pen name Ajay Lal)Rakesh Maria.

To sum up, Kabir Mohanty was right, "We are individually multiple."

The book is kind of a journey reader is taking with Suketu. Brilliantly written...!!!

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.

A great and maddening read.

I feel like some of the kinds of things that one could pass as swashbuckling investigative journalism 15 years ago (hanging out at whorehouses, inviting terrorists and rapists for cocktails in your high-rise, plying bar dancers with free food for access), now come across as baldly chauvinistic and either a little bit or very unethical. Midway through this, I started really feeling ill about it getting a Pulitzer nomination. The chapter on Monalisa—ick.

Things got better in the second half of the book with the chapter on the diamond merchants taking diksha and the runaway poet from Bihar. Great characters and complicated yarns, stories revealed by patient relationship-building. Good stuff.

But Mehta is so committed to the posture of explaining India to outsiders that he sometimes stops short of really getting into the nitty gritty—like on food or religion. I learned a lot about Jain theology but still felt like he held back on the real distinguishing philosophical details. Also, he was weirdly silent on Gujarati food and in my experience know-it-all Indian men have sooo much to say about their own regional cuisine (except how to cook it). (He was also weirdly quiet about his wife’s community, which I noted because, let’s be honest, I wanted to know more about what he really thinks about South Indian Brahmins—I guess it’s good sense to refrain from anthropological analysis of one’s in-laws, but there were lots of lines of inquiry in this book that weren’t very sensible!)

Anyway, this book enriched my understanding of Bombay and sense of that city’s insane magic, but it also left me feeling unexpectedly deep disdain for its writer.

Maximum City: In A Theatre Near You

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. - The cover boasts, without blushing.

Assume that you don’t know Mumbai. You have never lived in Mumbai. You might have bought ‘Maximum City’ thinking you would get a comprehensive idea on how Bombay works. But yet, the Mumbai you know and the Mumbai Suketu Mehta ‘finds’ are uncomfortably similar. Why? Both comes from Newspaper headlines and Movie stories - it is the sensational Mumbai, the most interesting parts, perhaps even the parts with most vitality. The ones always on the margins, and yet always in the spotlight. Viewed mostly indirectly. Mehta gives a rare and more direct view, but yet fails to capture a perfect shot, or even a good-enough one.

Isn’t it hard to imagine reading such a huge (and largely admired) book and find towards the end that nothing really surprised you, that nothing was revelatory - and this about a city you have never even lived in? Is your own insight so great, or maybe the book is perhaps a bit shallow? Surely, the second is the more plausible option. Sometimes presented in a slightly new light, a shift in perspective here and there; there are benefits, but much less than the effort put, by you as a reader, into the book warrants and demands, especially in 600-odd page non-fiction book.

In two and a half years, Suketu Mehta read a bit deeper than than the headlines, but not much broader, into the life of a city, was satisfied. And left.

It is a lot of pages. It give the impression of great depth. Typically it would take a long time to read. But you might find yourself with no real insights, nothing really new. Like adding detail to news stories - you might even feel that if you had investigated all the news stories a bit more this is what you would also end up with, and with less effort than reading a self-righteous book for it. Also you wouldn’t have had to put up with a reporter trying to be a saint. Or with endless commentary on a really bad movie.

It is quite plainly written for the outsider, for the western audience. Mehta himself is hardly a Mumbai native, having spent most of his life outside India, as thorough an NRI as they come. This is quite tritely defended by asserting that an external perspective is necessary to see things that we otherwise accept too readily in a fresh perspective. That would have been fine, if the fresh perspective was indeed there.

Also, it would have been really nice to speak a bit less of n  Mission Kashmirn. By the end, you would be more sick of the movie than if you had actually been forced into watching the atrocity.

Suketu can justify the sensationalist approach by saying: These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. Since I couldn’t do it in my own life, I followed others who did and who invited me to watch. I sat right at the edge of the stage, scattering these pieces of paper over them as payment.

In short, as voyeuristic as any Bollywood movie; and also a very narrow view for such an undertaking with such possibilities. It is a waste of time, pure and simple. I regret reading the book and for a change I don’t even want to advertise my reading in my shelves. This book is making its way into a second-hand bookstore some time soon.

The book is split into three sections: 'Power' (Politics & the Underworld), 'Pleasure' (Dance bars, Red Light Areas and Bollywood) and finally 'Passages' (meant to show the nature of Mumbai as a pass-through city, as a non-destination - illustrated by Slums, Migrants, Religious Renouncers, etc).

In each section, Mehta showcases the everyday problems of the people who inhabit that world (whether it is petty politics, gangways or prostitution) and humanizes them. Here the mission is very 'Orwellian' (in a different sense from how that word is usually employed - see here, if curious) and to a large extent Suketu succeeds in showing the human side of each of these most reviled frayed-edges of the city. Towards the end the book does unravel quickly into a series of almost random snapshots. It might be a catchy cinematic technique to employ, but it doesn’t fly so well. Our movie makers do love to experiment, in all the wrong places.

Unfortunately, however, Suketu is not satisfied with mere reporting. He wants to go beyond and hold forth on big problems and big solutions. He indulges in giving simplistic and grand-sounding summations of all the major problems, their causes and the solutions, all in one package. He ends up with cringe-inducing all-purpose assertions like:

n  

The reason Bombay is choking is the Rent Act.

n

**

n  

The root of the problem is that there are simply not enough policemen for this exploding city.

n

**

n  

A Mumbai Vs Bombay encapsulated as a Ghatis  Vs Bombayites war. (Ghati meaning hill-people, or the derogatory term for Marathi natives)

n

**

Why are so many bad movies made in India?
n  

The government can stomach a documentary film about the riots but not an emotional, mainstream one. The Enlightenment hasn’t reached these shores; it carries no weight.

n

**

And for a grand conclusion? -
n  

One blue-bright Bombay morning, in the middle of the masses on the street, I have a vision: that all these individuals, each with his or her own favorite song and hairstyle, each tormented by an exclusive demon, form but the discrete cells of one gigantic organism, one vast but singular intelligence, one sensibility, one consciousness. And if I understand them well, they will all merge back into me, and the crowd will become the self, one, many-splendored.

n
What could be more novel. Right?

Such a hopeful title: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Makes no sense, of course. But how does that matter. It is important for a good Masala Movie to have a catchy and evocative title.

After all, the whole book is in many ways a movie-making experience converted into a book, by a hitchhiker. So, we get a book obsessed with the very things Bollywood is anyway obsessed with, showcasing the same things that media wants us to lavish attention on. It only confirms your suspicions. Plus gives the heft of a book to back you confirmed ideas. Mehta’s prose is smooth, his insights hit half-way home now and then, but there is nothing to commend the whole exercise. What was lost and found, again?

It is truly a neither-here-nor-there work in the end: not content with providing incisive and up-close reporting of Bombay’s lives but also not going the whole hog and trying to understand the core of the city’s issues. For example, after spending untold pages tagging behind murderers and petty-criminals and criminal-politicians, the author concludes the section by saying that he has had too much of it and would prefer not to think about the horrors any more. And proceeds to wade into the pleasure section. How does a reader react to that?

Why has it been such a success? It is raw, unapologetic and crass at times (and it is okay to enjoy a B-movie if it is in the form of a respectable book). It does have a few good moments, few and far between but sparkling ones nevertheless.

Why is it a failure? If answered in a mere two and a half years, clearly there were not enough big questions, or big enough questions.


To read a better review, see here.

To read a better book, see here.

I wouldn't have been as critical had it not been a "non-fictional" book. But here we are.

Maximum City is the very first non-fiction novel I chose to read. It was an impromptu purchase at the airport en route Goa in 2018. I recollect having been unable to finish the book back then owing to the rampant over-simplification of everything about my city - its history, culture, people, communal strife.


2 years later, I decided to give the book (or myself) another chance. And the book did not disappoint me. The second half was replete with equally appalling vignettes. Mr Mehta has mastered the art of sensationalising the city of Mumbai, at times going so far as to tweak history or selectively ignore it, to suit his narrative.


Equally shocking, if not more, is the classist undertone throughout the book. “She sounded like a scheduled caste receptionist” or attributing the naming of a child Mahesh to his parent's “middle class imagination” (while naming his own son Akaash). These are the ones I recollect and can quote, while there are countless jibes some subtle, some not so much, throughout.


The book suffers from "hasty generalisation” - but is it unintentional? I suspect it isn’t. That very generalisation is essential for the reader that still regards India as a land of snake charmers. At the most the book is anecdotal, but it is also convenient for a non-Mumbaikar - it fits their idea of “maya ki nagri” (city of illusions).


Is everything about the book bad? Not at all! I did enjoy quite a few parts or I wouldn’t have been able to read 540 pages. But then what was I expecting when I picked up a book about Mumbai written by a New Yorker?

Okay, I maybe biased in giving 4 stars. It would have been 3 but for Bombay, the place I have lived all my life till now. Anyone who claims to love Bombay or calls themselves Bombayaite should read this one. Well-written, the books tries to cover the essence of the city. Riots/politics/police/bar dancers/film industry/ it covers almost everything. Although the book seems a little old in 2013, almost a decade late from the time it is based on, it is still worth a read. A detailed analysis will come soon.