Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

by Suketu Mehta

But cars have the same advantage that insects have over human intelligence: fecundity. The automobile won. No children play in the parking lot now.

The government took a look at the awesome urban problems plaguing the city, the infestation of corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy and the government, the abysmal state of Hindu—Muslim relations, and took decisive action. They changed the name of the capital city to Mumbai.

“Only weak persons believe in sin and virtue. My father works a lot, suffers in the trains. Now there is me. I don’t work a lot. I sit, I get a phone call, I go and put a bullet in someone and get a lakh of rupees. It is no big thing for me, but my father won’t be able to do that work. So he will give his fear a name: sin. He will call it principles or whatever.”

and, like many amateur playwrights, wants to start his own political party in ten years.

It is a Hindi version of Silence of the Lambs—with songs. Preity Zinta is the Jodie Foster character, a trainee CID inspector who falls in love with a gangster.

There was another unreasonable demand that reviewers and audiences imposed on Hollywood musicals: that the song fit the plot. Hindi movies face no such fascist guidelines.

He wants the two protagonists, the cop and the militant, as they clasp in embrace at the end, to be shot dead by a single bullet. “Let’s really give the audience something to think about,” the star proposes. “They’ll sit in the theater for fifteen minutes after the lights have come on, thinking about who could have shot them. Then they’ll say, ‘Shit . . . it’s the system!’”

When the constitution and the law don’t match, you’re talking about deep shit out here.”

Many of the names in this book have been changed, as has that of the city.