I'm here to give you my update on MAXIMUM CITY. Perhaps I was a little hasty in my praise. My respect for Suketu Mehta's intent has not waned, but my respect for his analytical and journalistic ability definitely has.
It's clear that Mehta is taking the path of brutal honesty, made trendy by writers like Naipaul. This is a style in which the writer acknowledges his own prejudices and writes from within them. Unfortunately, Mehta does not make this style work in his favor. His use of it only serves to make him seem a little simple-minded. For example, he starts by properly identifying his prejudices. He tells us of his childhood, growing up in a well-to-do family of Gujarati businessmen in a prosperous part of South Bombay. He identifies that he had prejudices against the native "ghatis" and that the only "ghatis" he knew were his servants. Kudos to Mehta for his honesty.
I have to wonder, however: Why does he continue to write through the lens of this prejudice some 30-odd years later? When describing Bombay's political takeover by the amorphous group he calls the ghatis, he says, "This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn't afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy the road signs." He contradicts himself at another point, where he points out that the ghatis are indeed advancing onto his roads: "Among the former owners, there is a sense that the barbarians have been let into the city gates and are sleeping on the footpath outside their palaces...the only consolation is that the huddled masses are also the talent pool for south Bombay's maids, drivers, peons."
The only consistent thing about Mehta's narrative is the constant us versus them rhetoric. The "us" is clearly Bombay's wealthy Parsi/Gujarati/Marwari community that Mehta knows so well. The "them" is illdefined and always changing in different contexts. The barbarous "them" that knocks at the city gates is so much more diverse than a bunch of poor ghati hindu Maharashtrian servants. It is Muslims, it is struggling immigrants from all over India, it is the Maharashtrian clerical middleclass.
The "them" that has changed the names of all the city's landmarks is Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena--not necessarily the upwardly mobile classes of people that knock at Mehta's gates.
These are big distinctions that get unfortunately lost in MAXIMUM CITY. In this book, anybody outside of Mehta's charmed circle is the Other, the ghati. (Which, incidentally, is a derogatory term for Maharashtrians.) By simplyfing the struggle for political power in Bombay into a simple us versus them, Gujaratis versus Marathis paradigm, Mehta does Bombay and his own impartiality a real disservice.
There are, however, stunning moments of self-awareness in Mehta's writing. There is a lone paragraph in which he stops wallowing in the prejudice he inherited from his parents and looks deeply at the struggle for power in Bombay, and situates it in a broader context of urban social mobility: "When people in south Bombay mourn the loss of the 'gracious' city, what they are really mourning is the loss of their own consequence in the city's affairs. It was never a gracious city for those who had to live under the shadow of the rich man's mansions; it was actively pestilential. It will take them a few generations, the new owners, to learn how to run their house and keep it clean and safe. But how can we begrudge them that when we, who have been owners for such a long time and had still botched it, handed it over in such terrible disrepair?"
As you can see, the moments where Mehta escapes his nostalgia for the Bombay of his youth, are the moments in which he sees the cosmic fairness of the poor and the disenfranchised rising to power by sometimes-ugly means (on the bullying strength of Shiv Sena) and sometimes-just means (better education and enterprise).
I only wish that Mehta put away his dated Gujarati versus Marathi mentality more often. After all, he was educated in America and hadn't lived in India for thirty years. I would have thought thirty years would be ample time to recover from the petty and intellect-crippling prejudices of our parents. Apparently not.
What results from his sad lack of self-reflexivity is a personal memoir--the gaze of a zealously secular, wealthy Gujarati upon a city that is communally divided, poor, multicultural, teeming. It is not the story of a journalist looking for the truth. | 
