iBlog: Nishit Shah

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is a narrative nonfiction book by Suketu Mehta. This book is extremely fascinating and its a must read for anyone who likes Bombay and wants to understand it in a much better way

BOMBAY is a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Over 18 million inhabitants are crammed into its 169 square miles, and in parts of the city the population density exceeds a million per square mile. Soon Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) will have more people than all of Australia. Mehta wandered its streets, with his ‘laptop in a green backpack,’ and pursued everything that, he writes, had made him ‘curious as a child’: ‘cops, gangsters, painted women, movie stars, people who give up the world.’

Its about Bombay what Suketu Mehta’s has seen. I have spent most part of my life living on this Island but never knew so much about it as described in this book. Its about Bombay that we have never seen or dealt with, the Bombay underworld, the 1993 Bombay blasts, Bollywood ( skipped this part on Bollywood. Not Interested !!), Bal Thackrey and of course Vadapav.

Undoubtedly one of the most important books ever written on Bombay. It is brave and insightful, one man’s love affair with a ruined city. In these pages, densely packed with facts, observations, vignettes and insights, he brings the city alive with love, longing and sadness in a way never accomplished.

To sum it up I can say that this book it kind of a remarkable documentary of life in India’s largest city.

Its amusing for me that I have read most part of this book out of Bombay while traveling !

Again, a must read for every Bombayite ..eeks I still don’t like calling it Mumbai.