Discussing the primary audience of Bollywood films, the lower and lower-middle classes, Mehta writes “ want to see an urban, affluent, glossy India, the India they imagine they grew up in” (2). We get a taste of this socio-economic divide in Suketu Mehta’s novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found when the author goes into detail on the booming Bollywood film industry in Mumbai. Looking at a map of Mumbai, it is apparent that the slums directly abut some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. Immediately, Mumbai, the richest city in India yet replete with sprawling slums and shantytowns, comes to mind. In her strictly economic analysis of global cities, Sassen claims that in global cities, “the growing number of high-level professionals and high-profit making specialized service firms have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socio-economic inequality evident in these cities” (1). As the rich got richer, the poor were forced furthe to the margins of society and massive socioeconomic inequality emerged.

He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.Tapping into the riches of the subcontinent allowed the Portuguese to build up Bombaim as a world-class trading port. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. Mehta has written original screenplays for films, including ‘New York, I Love You’. He is also working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

His book about global migration, ‘This Land is Our Land’, will be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in June 2019. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘All Things Considered.’ Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award.

Maximum city bombay lost and found