The Chronicles of Mumbai

The Chronicles of Mumbai
Author: Gairika Mitra
Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-09-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9354903371

There was something about the high rises that appealed to her particularly. Sometimes, she�d wonder whether those high rises had a heart since they were a witness to so much happening around. She would look at them, and just ponder deeply about their existence, her existence, and where she belonged in this naked world. She continued contemplating and looking at those buildings when her eyes rested on the most simple, dilapidated one where Alex Ford worked. She always felt an undiscovered, and unjustified attraction towards that building. Even though it was a high rise, this building was designed differently and was in no way similar to one of those typical architectural skyscrapers that filled the whole of New York. There was something special about this that no words or adjectives could substantiate� The tip of the building resembled a cone that went steeper and sharper towards its vertex. Whenever she felt exhausted from the day�s work or the times when she�d be losing her motivation to slog , she�d just be staring at the cone, trying to decipher its meaning. Her eyes would move in oscillatory, linear and circulatory movements and she�d notice the caricatures even more minutely. What amazed her the most was that no one design was identical to the other. Somewhere they appeared a little cylindrical, and in some places, elliptical. Looking at them, and studying them deeply, Shan could say that each of them had a story to tell.

Riots and After in Mumbai

Riots and After in Mumbai
Author: Meena Menon
Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-12-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9788132107002

Riots and After in Mumbai provides a synoptic record of events in Mumbai, focusing essentially on the history of riots in the city. Using this framework, it attempts to understand the sociopolitical and cultural realities of present-day Mumbai through a collection of narratives of the people affected by the communal riots of 1992–93. Author Meena Menon uses a novel approach, combining historical records from the pre-Independence era (1893–1945) and personal interviews of both Muslims and Hindus living in the city. It also looks into the political manipulations that ordinary people of both communities alike are subjected to by the ruling powers and political parties.

Mumbai Fables

Mumbai Fables
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2010-10-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 069114284X

Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization. --

Castaway Mountain

Castaway Mountain
Author: Saumya Roy
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 166260095X

*One of NPR's "Books We Love 2021"* "'I came to see the mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives,' Roy writes, 'of the endless chase for our desires to fill us.' Readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers will be drawn to this harrowing portrait." —Publishers Weekly "Castaway Mountain deserves every accolade. A stunning achievement." —Kiran Desai, Booker Prize Winner, author of Inheritance of Loss. All of Mumbai’s possessions and memories come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. Towering at the outskirts of the city, the mountains are covered in a faint smog from trash fires. Over time, as wealth brought Bollywood knock offs, fast food and plastics to Mumbaikars, a small, forgotten community of migrants and rag-pickers came to live at the mountains’ edge, making a living by re-using, recycling and re-selling. Among them is Farzana Ali Shaikh, a tall, adventurous girl who soon becomes one of the best pickers in her community. Over time, her family starts to fret about Farzana’s obsessive relationship to the garbage. Like so many in her community, Farzana, made increasingly sick by the trash mountains, is caught up in the thrill of discovery—because among the broken glass, crushed cans, or even the occasional dead baby, there’s a lingering chance that she will find a treasure to lift her family’s fortunes. As Farzana enters adulthood, her way of life becomes more precarious. Mumbai is pitched as a modern city, emblematic of the future of India, forcing officials to reckon with closing the dumping grounds, which would leave the waste pickers more vulnerable than ever. In a narrative instilled with superstition and magical realism, Saumya Roy crafts a modern parable exploring the consequences of urban overconsumption. A moving testament to the impact of fickle desires, Castaway Mountain reveals that when you own nothing, you know where true value lies: in family, community and love. Interior map illustration copyright (c) Jake Coolidge

Bombay, Meri Jaan

Bombay, Meri Jaan
Author: Jerry Pinto
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780143029663

When King Charles Ii Of England Married Princess Catherine De Braganza Of Portugal In 1661, He Received As Part Of His Dowry The Isles Of Bom Bahia, The Good Bay. Reclaimed From The Sea, These Would Become The Modern City Of Bombay. A Marriage Of Affluence And Abject Poverty, Where A Grey Concrete Jungle Is The Backdrop To A Heady Potpourri Of Ethnic, Linguistic And Religious Subcultures, Bombay, Renamed Mumbai After The Goddess Mumbadevi, Defies Definition. Bombay, Meri Jaan, Comprising Poems And Prose Pieces By Some Of The Biggest Names In Literature, In Addition To Cartoons, Photographs, A Song And A Bombay Duck Recipe, Tries To Capture The Spirit Of This Great Metropolis. Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Dilip Chitre, Saadat Hasan Manto, V.S. Naipaul, Khushwant Singh And Busybee, Among Others, Write About Aspects Of The City: The High-Rise Apartments And The Slums; Camaraderie And Isolation In The Crowded Chawls; Bhelpuri On The Beach And Cricket In The Gully; The Women'S Compartment Of A Local Train; Encounter Cops Who Battle The Underworld; The Jazz Culture Of The Sixties; The Monsoon Floods; The Shiv Sena; The Cinema Halls; The Sea. Vibrant, Engaging And Provocative, This Is An Anthology As Rich And Varied As The City It Celebrates.

Bombay Balchão

Bombay Balchão
Author: Jane Borges
Publisher: Tranquebar
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: Mumbai (India)
ISBN: 9789389152081

Bombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the nineteenth century: among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans. Looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena). Lovers and haters, friends and family, married men and determined singles, churchgoers and abstainers, Bombay Balchão is a tangled tale of ordinary lives - of a woman who loses her husband to a dockyard explosion and turns to bootlegging, a teen romance that drowns like a paper boat, a social misfit rescued by his addiction to crosswords, a wife who tries to exorcise the spirit of her dead mother-in-law from her husband, a rebellious young woman who spurns true love for the abandonment of dance. Ordinary, except when seen through their own eyes.

Mumbai New York Scranton

Mumbai New York Scranton
Author: Tamara Shopsin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-03-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451687435

An extraordinarily moving memoir from an iconoclastic new talent—an artist, cook, and illustrator whose adventures at home and abroad reveal the importance of living life with your eyes wide open. Best known for her witty illustrations, and as a cook beside her mischievous father in her family’s legendary Manhattan restaurant, in Mumbai New York Scranton, Tamara Shopsin offers a brilliantly inventive, spare, and elegant chronicle of a year in her life characterized by impermanence. In a refreshingly original voice alternating between tender and brazen, Shopsin recounts a trip to the Far East with her sidekick husband and the harrowing adventure that unfolds when she comes home. Entire worlds, deep relationships, and indelible experiences are portrayed in Shopsin’s deceptively simple and sparse language and drawings. Blending humor, love, suspense—and featuring photographs by Jason Fulford—Mumbai New York Scranton inspires a kaleidoscope of emotions. Shopsin’s surprising and affecting tale will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Shantaram

Shantaram
Author: Gregory David Roberts
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 945
Release: 2004-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429908270

Based on his own extraordinary life, Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram is a mesmerizing novel about a man on the run who becomes entangled within the underworld of contemporary Bombay—the basis for the Apple + TV series starring Charlie Hunnam. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere. As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city’s poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power. Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart.

Wanderers, All

Wanderers, All
Author: Janhavi Acharekar
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2015-02-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9351770168

An experimental novel that blurs the boundaries between historical fiction, memoir and travelogue, Wanderers, All is the story of Murlidhar Khedekar whose life plays out against the birth of a new nation in the first half of the twentieth century.Having migrated to Bombay from a small Konkan village, a young Khedekar attempts to find a place in the vibrant Marathi theatre scene of that era. When he fails to realize his ambitions as an actor, he gradually transitions from a clerk to a wrestler and eventually, a cop in the Bombay City Police. Providing a sharp - and often amusing - contrast to his life story is the travelogue of his great granddaughter, who sets out on a solo road trip across the Goan coastline, wandering across its beaches, parties and villages.Seamlessly alternating between two eras, and across Portuguese and British rule in India, Wanderers, All throws up questions of divided loyalty, belonging and ownership, of borders between humans and countries. Combining elements of theatre, travel and politics, it is a novel about the journeys we embark on - the purposeful and the aimless.

Renaissance State

Renaissance State
Author: Girish Kuber
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9390327407

Maharashtra. Among the country's largest, wealthiest, most significant constituents. A great state in name and in deed that has been the cradle of individuals and events that have shaped India. Girish Kuber - seasoned journalist and one of Maharashtra's foremost opinion makers - tells its story in Renaissance State. Taking in his vast sweep the region's politics, society and history from the time of the Satavahanas down to the present day, he chronicles a number of lesser-known tales: the empire that brought the mighty Mughals to their knees, the woman who took the issue of consent in marital sex right up to Queen Victoria, the social reformers who were far ahead of their time, the evolution of movements of the right and left as well as for Dalit identity, and the long tradition of this great land of always standing up to Delhi. This is the account of the making of Maharashtra that its proud people deserved but had remained unwritten.