Maximum City

I just have completed reading the bestseller Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. It's a book about Bombay or Mumbai as it had just been rechristened when Mehta moved back to it after having lived 20 odd years in New York. The book is almost 600 pages long and people who generally get scared of such huge books (must be something to with the childhood fear of textbooks which themselves were gargantuan monsters) or those who don't read anything other than the Harry Potter meganovels, would be apprehensive to wade through its pages.

However once you do so, you find yourself entrenched into a world that seems at once so familiar to Mumbaikars (when he describes the crowded state of the metropolis) but also sometimes seem to be happening in some far off world. For Mehta's book is peppered with the accounts and experiences of some of the more extreme citizens of Mumbai - extortionists, gangsters, bar dancers, super-cops, Bollywood directors and super rich and super-orthodox Jain patriarchs. Mehta has found himself in the company of varied personalities like Bal Thackeray, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Sanjay Dutt and Chotta Shakeel at one point or other during the course of the book.

I found myself hating and applauding Mumbai at various points of time, alternating between wanting to move from this accursed city as soon as possible or strengthening my resolve to stick it out here between different chapters. But throughout I was constantly completely engrossed in the simple words (he also has peppered the novel with coarse Bombaiyya phrases that seem so natural to our ears) that Mehta uses to weave a rich and vividly coloured tapestry which is what this novel really is.

I spent all my free time this past week devouring up pages of this book, while I should really have been studying for the dreaded CAT which looms ever closer. But i have a long history of starting mega-novels just before an important exam. Like the time I started and completed Ayn Rand's Fountainhead 10 days before my second Semester Engg exams.

Anyhoo, I seriously recommend this book. I am sure that once you start, you will be hooked onto it, and when you finish you will have that heady feeling within you telling you that you've read something worthwhile, something that will remain with you.
Peace out.