Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
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!)
Maximum City: In A Theatre Near YouA 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 Mission Kashmir. 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: The reason Bombay is choking is the Rent Act.** The root of the problem is that there are simply not enough policemen for this exploding city.** A Mumbai Vs Bombay encapsulated as a Ghatis Vs Bombayites war. (Ghati meaning hill-people, or the derogatory term for Marathi natives)**Why are so many bad movies made in India? 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.**And for a grand conclusion? - 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.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.
What do You think about Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found (2005)?
Dealing with this book has been a very difficult task for me ! I found it extremely hard to read and scary. Does it have a difficult language? Oh no..not at all. It is the scenes that sends a shudder down your spine. They are the ones ..so boorish, very crude, goosebumpishly raw! I remember having a similar feeling while reading about the plight of women in Kabul. But, this book is based on the city I was born and lived most of my life in and most of it parallel with my formative years. Needless to say, but nothing in this book will make me change the way I feel about Mumbai, I still very dearly love the city and given a choice would love to be settled here.Nevertheless, in hindsight, an interesting read, an "open-your-eyes-wide" with an "Oh" and a "seriously???" every second paragraph or so, a heartwarming insight into the city at some points and a gripping narrative ( though requires a few breaks to digest the overwhelming facts about power,infidelity, torture, convalescence of the "just" & the "wronger" & the "affluent" & the "destitute").
—Shruti
I'm having a difficult time finishing this book. I usually read it for a few days and then need a break due to the overwhelming detail and drama that Mehta inserts into his prose. I honestly liked the beginning of the book in which Mehta made me feel as though I could see Bombay: crowding around a street stall for the best food in town, the need to bribe every public official for every little (and big) convenience, the dearth of toilets, the omnipresent din, the rich, the poor, etc. But now I'm stuck on a section where Mehta is fixated upon a beer bar girl. It seems overly "male gaze" to me, especially when the previous section was his expose of the gangwar. He's a drooling, over-eager fourteen-year-old boy--a fourteen year old boy who then goes home to his wife and child and has fancy dinner parties--and I can't help rolling my eyes. I know I'm totally ignorant since I've never been to Bombay, but it's as if someone wrote a book about NYC and just wrote about partying with strippers from Scores and rolling with gang bangers then retired every evening to their loft in Soho. Give me a break, Mehta, and decide whether you're a journalist or a memoirist. You can't be both.
—Liza
This book was a mixed bag for me. There is some great narrative in Mehta's tale of his return to the city of his youth as an adult. His description of learning how to navigate the corrupt bureaucracy in order to get enough cooking gas for his new flat was priceless. But as he begins to delve more deeply into explorations of politics, organized crime and the sex trade, particularly his growing friendship with a bar girl, the narrative outlasted my interest. I really enjoyed certain sections of this book, but it was uneven and I found myself skimming the last third.
—Lena
