Suketu Mehta: Mumbai
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 4:38PM 
Writer Suketu Mehta glimpses our possible urban future through the lens of the vastly contrasting lifestyles in Mumbai, the biggest, fastest, richest city in India, and with a population of 21 million, larger and more crowded than many nation states.
PRAISE FOR MAXIMUM CITY: Bombay Lost and Found from suketumehta.com
Bombay native Mehta fills his kaleidoscopic portrait of "the biggest, fastest, richest city in India" with captivating moments of danger and dismay. Returning to Bombay (now known as Mumbai) from New York after a 21-year absence, Mehta is depressed by his beloved city's transformation, now swelled to 18 million and choked by pollution. Investigating the city's bloody 1992-1993 riots, he meets Hindus who massacred Muslims, and their leader, the notorious Godfather-like founder of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, Bal Thackeray, "the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in."
Daring to explore further the violent world of warring Hindu and Muslim gangs, Mehta travels into the city's labyrinthine criminal underworld with tough top cop Ajay Lal, developing an uneasy familiarity with hit men who display no remorse for their crimes. Mehta likewise deploys a gritty documentary style when he investigates Bombay's sex industry, profiling an alluring, doomed dancing girl and a cross-dressing male dancer who leads a strange double life.
Mehta includes so-called "Bollywood" in his sweeping account of Bombay's subcultures: he hilariously recounts, in diary style, day-to-day life on the set among the aging male stars of the action movie Mission Kashmir. Mehta, winner of a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Prize, is a gifted stylist. His 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 while introducing the reader to much that is truly new and strange. Agent, Faith Childs Literary Agency. (Sept. 26)— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
India, culture, global, population, poverty in Pop!Tech 2005
Reader Comments (23)
Hmmm....BOMBAY...Ii never hear about it. but after two major disaster like one that heavy rain fall and second that terrorist attack I come to know about this city. Glad to read about it.
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Mumbai is the commercial and entertainment center, capital of India, generating 5% of GDP in India and a share of 25% of industrial production, 70% of maritime trade in India (Mumbai Port Trust and JNPT) and 70% of capital transactions the economy of India.
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Mumbai is a very important city of INDIA.Yes it is right that mumbai is great commercial and entertainment center.I had never seen it but it is very popular city.
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Mumbai, India's GDP to 5% of generating commercial and entertainment center, the capital of India's industrial production and a 25% stake, India (Mumbai Port Trust and JNPT) in the maritime trade of seventy percent and capital transactions is of India's economy.
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Mumbai is the commercial and entertainment capital of India, generating 5% of GDP in India and 25% share of industrial production, 70% of maritime trade in India (Mumbai Port Trust and JNPT) and 70% of transactions in shares of the Indian economy.
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