"Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found" By Suketu Mehta

 My last read was called "Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found" by an NRI (Non-resident Indian) author who spent some of his childhood and formative years in the financial capital of India i.e. Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) and most of his young - adult life in New York. This is his narrative on how he tries to find familiarity with a city he left as a kid and tries to relate to it in its current state.

I love that city as some of my best years' at the start of my employed life and away from my parents started there - and even though it rapes your pocket off money and your mind off peace - it still enriches you with experience not paralleled in any similar city in India. Hence reading and understand the city with the author seemed extra special to me and I could hardly put the book down. 

The author meets all kinds of people who inhabit the city and circumstances you find yourselves in if you live there - from Gangsters, policemen, Prostitutes/ Bar-dancers/ call-girls, normal slum dwellers, political workers, ministers, an everyday financial market worker, hard-working normal people (ignorant), the famous local train and its idiosyncrasies, the mad rush to everywhere, the hyper-posh filthy-rich people, the bunch that makes up Bollywood - actors, directors, financiers (seems it includes a lot of under-world money), what all is right with the city and of course, what really makes the city wrong as well. 

A lot of it is a reflection of India as a totality, but foremost in my head is the clarity on Gangsters and gang-wars and the staged 'encounters' by the police to kill these outlaws. This bit, I agree didn't end with a feel-good factor as violence is never good - and the line between right and wrong - law and an out-law is very thin and rather feeble.

On the other extreme the book also mentions the story of a rich diamond trader who along with his family of teenage kids and wife - decide to leave the city life with its modernity and give away all their wealth and possessions and wander off into a life of begging - a life which shuns all material possessions. Pretty difficult that - even to attempt for a month (for me personally as I could think of it). How a city can push people to extremes and be an extreme on its own in lieu of its inhabitants, makes up what was for me a bloody good read!