Reading in/about/around Mumbai

One of the perks of a loud, a/c-less 20-min cab ride everyday is my new-found ability to read for pleasure (impossible to take calls or enjoy music). I've finished 3 books in the last 2 months, while still a pathetic number, it's more than I've read in 2 years in New York.

Two of the books I've read are ones everyone has been recommending as soon I mentioned I was moving to India: Maximum City and The White Tiger. Today, I'll be literally taking a page from the literary blog of my good friend Andrew Seal and provide some reflections on recent readings.


Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Mehta's brutally realistic and extraordinary witty observations of India through the lens of repat made for truly entertaining and entirely relevant reading for me. I started reading the novel midway through my own online Maximum City-style chronicling and noticed often Mehta and I have made observations about similar topics (e.g. traffic, bureaucratic pace, food, housing, etc.) Perhaps even a Maximum City has a limited set of genuinely compelling topics to write about? As for criticisms of the novel, Mehta starts from an unusually negative viewpoint of the city but quickly romanticizes all the ills he sees--is he trying to convince the reader or himself? His personal writing style is extremely "wandery" and "rambly"; the novel could have been helped by a true flow of narrative instead of a random assortment of chapters and sections. Regardless, I think Maximum City is an essential read for anyone considering a move to Mumbai.


The White Tiger

The only aspect of the primitively written White Tiger that pulled me through was the enormous sense of tension--why did the driver kill his gentle, foreign educated, young Indian boss? Upon further reflection, I forgive Adiga's utter lack of subtlety as his novel draws attention to an issue taken for granted in places like India: the rigid class system that divides people into the service class and non-service class. The image of two overlapping worlds operating in parallel, oblivious of other's pleasures and plights reminds us of the existence of feudalistic mores in human society in the age of the iPhone. Perhaps, I should be afraid that my future driver hails from the same thinly veiled "Darkness" region of India as the novel's murderous protagonist.


Currently I'm reading English, August; I'm always looking for reading list recommendations, so please don't hesitate to suggest--as long as you don't say Shantaram.