Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

One of Suketu Mehta's themes is that the physical infrastructure of Mumbau is so awful and overcrowded that only immaterial attractions could persuade people to live there. Maximum City is crowded, but not unpleasantly so, with people who embody some of the forces that give Mumbai its character- the leader and the footsoldiers of a Hindu nationalist movement, a dazzling and tragic dancer, her cross-dressing colleague, and a teenage poet, among others. Some of the people Mehta interviewed seemed eerily familiar, and in a few cases it was with good reason. First there was a whole chapter about the police chief who is portrayed in the movie "Black Friday"; during which I learned that Indian censors will bleep obscenities (I couldn't understand the dialog and there were no captions so I assume that's what was happening), but have no problem with showing beatings of such ferocity that the subject's fingernails fall off. Then in the chapter "Black-collared Workers", I began to notice a lot of similarities between the gangsters Suketu Mehta interviewed and the characters in Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games". Then I see this sentence: "I am with my friend Vikram, who is writing a novel about the underworld and who has asked to come along." Synergies! There were things I found mildly irritating about this book about Mumbai- when he uses four letter words I could just imagine his face from the book jacked smirking slightly as if to say "Look what I did there!"- but on the whole it was sufficiently gripping that I started arriving places early just because then I'd have time to read it while I was waiting.