Resumo de Maximum City - suketu mehta

Maximum City by
suketu mehta

The first lines of maximum city says
that ?there will soon be more people living in the city of
Bombay than on the continent of Australia?. So the author
makes himself clear in the initial lines ,only, how
difficult a task chronicling the life of Bombay is. Bombay
is truly a cosmopolitan city and it seems at once that all
the peripatetic people in the world are coming to Bombay.

Bombay has always been a breeding
ground for writing. Midnight?s children written by salman
rushdie(which,incidentally won him a booker) had a major
portion of itself dedicated to Bombay. Vikram chandra wrote
the love and longing in Bombay. Recently Gregory David
Roberts wrote about the low-life of Bombay in the
bestseller Shantaram. Suketu Mehta wrote maximum city after
thorough research and that research is quite evident in the
book.
The book is divided into three
parts and each part tells the story of Bombay in its own
way. Writing on a city like mumbai can be very dicey
considering the fact that it needs to include everything-
shiv sena,underworld,bar dancers,eunuchs,cross dressers,
politicians,vada pav,chawl,bomb blasts,encounter specialists
and of course BOLLYWOOD- and suketu manages quite well to do
that. Had he kept fictitious names it would have vitiated
the book but suketu mehta had the gumption to write about
everyone right from bal thackeray to the D-company to the
encounter specialists to the machinations occuring in the
bollywood to the plight of bar dancers to the ostracisation
of
Transvestites in bomaby to the life of a family in a
mumbai chawl. And he manages to do that with an undercurrent
of subtle humour.
At one level the book may be
picaresque but the characters like sunil,raghav,et al make
this book a magnifying look into the lifes of the henchmen
and slum dwellers. Some scenes are definitely worth
repulsive but that?s exactly what non-fiction is meant to
say. The scenes where the henchmen kill a guy with utter
impunity to the one where the author vividly describes a
toilet of slum really make this book a worth read.

No wonder the author?s proximity to vidhu vinod chopra
made him peep into the lives of sanjay dutt and mahesh
bhatt. The story of monalisa and honey depict the inimitable
mumbaiyya spirit. The whole episode of chawls gives the
reader an insight into the chawl life which the sceptics
might say is nothing compared to the way it was depicted in
shantaram. But one needs to consider the fact that shantaram
is more of an autobiography of gregory david roberts. But
maximum city is the autobiography of mumbai and so the
author had to make this book a cornucopia of information on
the life in mumbai.
The denoument of
maximum city is the most grotesque part of the book. It
talks about jainism and before reading this book I could
never imagine a religion being so harsh. The only grouse ,
or two,for a hardcore mumbaikar may be the fact that the
famous sidhhivinayak temple and sachin tendukar have not
been dedicated a single page. But then this book is not
meant for individuals. If it would have been then lata
mangeshkar and amitabh bachchan also would have got their
own chunk of space in the book.

This
book is a must read for all mumbaites who may be quarantined
from the murky things of mumbai and even more a must read
for non mumbaiites because its simply unbelievable that so
many things can happen in one city. In short, the hardcover
costs five hundred and ninety five bucks but go for it and
you would not be disappointed.

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