Bombay or Mumbai is the city of dreams. But are these dreams rosy, shattered or plain imperfect?
That's precisely what Bombay native Suketu Mehta sets out to address in his portrait of the "biggest, fastest and richest city in India."
Mehta has the advantage of viewing the city with the vision of an outsider. After all he left the city as a teenager, returned to it 21 years later, only to re-discover his vastly transformed hometown.
The changes are not just physical - its not the rapidly growing numbers living there, the collapse of basic services like water, roads et al. There are deeper and more fundamental changes that have taken place in his so-called dream city.
At a more subtle level, it has emerged as a city divided. The divide he is talking about is not the one between the rich and the poor, it is a deeper and a more dangerous divide.
An attempt to undertstand how that happened, took Mehta close to seven years of reserach.
The research is extensive and it shows. The book swings between danger and dismay as the author adeptly explores all these dramatic transformations.
His interviews with the city's top cop coupled with some more dangerous liaisons gives the reader rare insights into the world's third largest metropolis.
Yes, this hard-hitting book drags in parts specially when he goes into the love and longing bits with a beer bar dancer, but that is just about the only way to capture the various sub-cultures of the city that had at last count left 17 million people smitten.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Suketu Mehta dons several hats. He is a journalist, fiction and script writer. He has been called a gifted stylist and is the winner of a Whiting Award and an O Henry Prize. He left Bombay as a teenager and returned 21 years later. He was recently awarded the prestigious Kiriyama Prize for 'Maximum City'.
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING
"Mehta's sophisticated voice conveys postmodern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew." - Publisher's Weekly
"Like one of Bombay's teeming chawls, Maximum City is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination, filled with detail, drama and a richly varied cast of characters." - Amitav Ghosh, Author |
Deepika Shetty is a Producer with Prime Time Morning and takes care of the book segment 'Off The Shelf' as well. | 
