Volume 51, Number 18 · November 18, 2004
Bombay: The Lower Depths
By Pankaj Mishra
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
by Suketu Mehta
Knopf, 542 pp., $27.95
In 1998, Suketu Mehta, a writer based in New York, returned to Bombay, where he had spent much of his childhood, in order to research a book on the city. Built by the British, Bombay remains India's financial and commercial capital, and, despite being inhabited by 14 million people, most of whom live in slums, and a growing reputation for violent crime, it continues to inspire hopes for a better future everywhere in the rest of India. For two and a half years, Mehta wandered its streets, with his 'laptop in a green backpack,' and pursued everything that, he writes, had made him 'curious as a child': 'cops, gangsters, painted women, movie stars, people who give up the world.'
Review, 4298 words
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