Maximum Mehta

I wish I'd had the nous to read this piece by Suketu Mehta before being mugged, with extreme politeness, in phoren lands. Next time someone in a dark corner of the globe asks for my wallet, I'm going to sing 'Ichak dana pichak dana' at them. (I know what they're going to do with the cash and small change, but what on earth are they going to make of the picture of my favourite cat, she of the orange fur, which had travelled around for years in the coin pocket, attached with a pink Bandaid to a picture of Che?)

Suketu Mehta on Bollywood, from The New York Times (*):
"The Indian film industry has penetrated into vast, and unlikely, areas of the globe; a hit Hindi movie will be dubbed or subtitled in a dozen foreign languages -- French, Mandarin, Malay. In New York, whenever I get a haircut, I'm confident of getting a discount if the hairdresser is from the former Soviet Union. Indian movies became popular there beginning in the 1950's. The Soviets gave us arms; we gave them our kitsch movies in return. Israelis watch them. Palestinians watch them. Indians and Pakistanis watch them. Dominicans and Haitians watch them. Iraqis watch them. Iranians watch them. In a building full of immigrants in Queens, an Uzbek man once cornered me in a dark stairwell. I'd been mugged before, and I thought, Oh, no. As he towered over me, he started singing, "Ichak dana bichak dana, . . . " a Bollywood standard from the 50's.
All these people watch Bollywood movies because the stories they tell are pre-cynical. Bollywood believes in motherhood, patriotism and true love. Hollywood is too ambivalent about family for their tastes. My friend Abdelkader, a Moroccan writer who grew up in the Netherlands, told me why Moroccans watch Hindi movies: 'We like that, in the end, everyone bows down and touches the mother's feet.'"

This week's NYT has a review of Suketu's Maximum City by Akash Kapur:
"...Mehta's most impressive skill lies not in his documentary prowess but in the psychological acuity of his writing: we come away from his encounters feeling we know the inner lives of the people he has depicted. In this sense, ''Maximum City'' is more than a consideration of the material limits on urban living; it is a profound meditation on the existential (and even spiritual) longings that persist despite those limits.
There is, for example, the dancing girl who dares to dream of escaping her sad existence in a seedy bar by winning the Miss India beauty pageant. And then there's the unemployed young migrant worker from Bihar, one of India's most backward states, struggling to establish a career as a poet. Mehta may ask why anyone would come to Bombay, but people like these have an answer: The cramped city still gives them room to dream, still allows them to live, as Mehta puts it, ''closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known.''
Alongside the cops and terrorists and call girls, there's another character seeking his seductive extremity: Mehta himself. Both a public and an intensely private book, ''Maximum City'' is not just about a city but also about one man's search for himself in that city."