#Suketu Mehta

[booksonbombay]

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found - Suketu Mehta

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider's view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks.

As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.

Review: Goodreads Shop: https://amzn.to/2TCsWA9

Book Details:  Paperback: 600 pages Publisher: Penguin Random House India (18 September 2017) Language: English ISBN-10: 9780144001590 ISBN-13: 978-0144001590 ASIN: 0144001594

[diginsider]

Bring on the Immigrants!

Bring on the Immigrants!

“These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones. But as the immigrants see it, the game was rigged: First, the rich countries colonized us and stole our treasure and prevented us from building industries. After plundering us for centuries, they left, having drawn up maps in ways that ensured permanent strife between our communities. Then…

[bigtickhk]

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta 

US: https://amzn.to/2QzQmUC 

UK: https://amzn.to/31sXpmW

[jbginsberg]

President Donald Trump orders his aides to break the law to build the wall while others see immigration as a form of reparations.

[averycanadianfilm]

This Land is Our Land

A PLANET ON THE MOVE

One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “Why are you here?” the man demanded. “Why are you in my country?”

“Because we are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.

* * *

These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones. But as the migrants see it, the game was rigged: First, the rich countries colonized us and stole our treasure and prevented us from building our industries. After plundering us for centuries, they left, having drawn up maps in ways that ensured permanent strife between our communities. Then they brought us to their countries as “guest workers”—as if they knew what the word “guest” meant in our cultures—but discouraged us from bringing our families.

Having built up their economies with our raw materials and our labor, they asked us to go back and were surprised when we did not. They stole our minerals and corrupted our governments so that their corporations could continue stealing our resources; they fouled the air above us and the waters around us, making our farms barren, our oceans lifeless; and they were aghast when the poorest among us arrived at their borders, not to steal but to work, to clean their shit, and to fuck their men.

Still, they needed us. They needed us to fix their computers and heal their sick and teach their kids, so they took our best and brightest, those who had been educated at the greatest expense of the struggling states they came from, and seduced us again to work for them. Now, again, they ask us not to come, desperate and starving though they have rendered us, because the richest among them need a scapegoat. This is how the game is rigged today.

My family has moved all over the earth, from India to Kenya to England to the United States and back again—and is still moving. One of my grandfathers left rural Gujarat for Calcutta in the salad days of the twentieth century; my other grandfather, living a half day’s bullock-cart ride away, left soon after for Nairobi. In Calcutta, my paternal grandfather joined his older brother in the jewelry business; in Nairobi, my maternal grandfather began his career, at sixteen, sweeping the floors of his uncle’s accounting office. Thus began my family’s journey from the village to the city. It was, I now realize, less than a hundred years ago.

I am now among the quarter billion people living in a country other than the one they were born in. I’m one of the lucky ones; in surveys, nearly three-quarters of a billion people want to live in a country other than the one they were born in, and will do so as soon as they see a chance. Why do we move? Why do we keep moving?

* * *

On October 1, 1977, my parents, my two sisters, and I boarded a Lufthansa plane in the dead of night in Bombay. We were dressed in new, heavy, uncomfortable clothes and had been seen off by our entire extended family, who had come to the airport with garlands and lamps; our foreheads were anointed with vermilion. We were going to America.

To get the cheapest tickets, our travel agent had arranged a circuitous journey in which we disembarked in Frankfurt, where we were to take an internal flight to Cologne, and then onward to New York. In Frankfurt, the German border officer scrutinized the Indian passports belonging to my father, my sisters, and me and stamped them. Then he held up my mother’s passport with distaste. “You are not allowed to enter Germany,” he said.

It was a British passport, given to citizens of Indian origin who had been born in Kenya before independence, like my mother. But the British did not want them. Nine years earlier, Parliament had passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, summarily depriving hundreds of thousands of British passport holders in East Africa of their right to live in the country that conferred their nationality. The passport was literally not worth the paper it was printed on.

The German officer decided that because of her uncertain status, my mother might somehow desert her husband and three small children to make a break for it and live in Germany by herself. So we had to leave directly from Frankfurt. Seven hours and many airsickness bags later, we stepped out into the international arrivals lounge at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A graceful orange-and-black-and-yellow Alexander Calder mobile twirled above us against the backdrop of a huge American flag, and multicolored helium balloons dotted the ceiling, souvenirs of past greetings. As each arrival was welcomed to the new land by their relatives, the balloons rose to the ceiling to make way for the newer ones. They provided hope to the newcomers: look, in a few years, with luck and hard work, you, too, can rise here. All the way to the ceiling.

It was October 2—Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. We made our way in a convoy of cars carrying our eighteen bags and steamer trunks to a studio apartment in Jackson Heights where The Six Million Dollar Man was playing on the television. On the first night, the building super cut off the electricity because there were too many people in one room. I stepped out and looked at the rusting elevated train tracks above Roosevelt Avenue and wondered: Where was the Statue of Liberty?

* * *

At McClancy, the brutal all-boys Catholic high school where my parents enrolled me in Queens, my chief tormentor was a boy named Tschinkel. He had blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a sadistic smile. He coined a name for me: Mouse. As I walked through the hallways, this word followed me: “Mouse! Mouse!” A small brown rodent, scurrying furtively this way and that. I was fourteen years old.

One Spanish class, Tschinkel put his leg out to trip me as I was walking in; I kicked hard at it as the entire class whooped. “Mouse! Mouse!”

As I left the class and walked to the stairwell, I felt a hand shoving me forward. I flew straight down the small flight of stairs and landed on my feet, clutching my books; I could as easily have not, and broken my neck. When I complained to the principal, I was told that such things happen. It was within the normal order of the McClancy day.

Four decades later, another German American bully from Queens became the most powerful man on the planet. The 2016 election particularly struck home for me. Donald Trump is like the fathers of the boys I went to high school with. He grew up in Jamaica Estates, then a gated white island in the middle of the most diverse county in the nation. That explains everything about him, his fear and hatred of people different from him.

According to Trump, Haitians “all have AIDS.” If Nigerians are allowed into the United States, they would never “go back to their huts.” Mexicans? “They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.” About immigrants in general: “Everything’s coming across the border: the illegals, the cars, and the whole thing. It’s like a big mess. Blah. It’s like vomit.” All this was shocking to many people, but familiar to me, because I’d heard it from the McClancy boys—and some of the teachers.

Copyright © 2019 by Suketu Mehta

Copyright © 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1953 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan

[rininwaterloo]

If you gunna read one book this year, make it this one. The entire book is a quote. Should be quoted everywhere, daily. Omg. So good and enlightening and needed. I’ve renewed this 2 times now cos I just HAVE finish it and learn more.

Also, fuck you Niall Ferguson. Fuck you Bruce Gilley.

[davidpotash]

Urban Love Letter

How does one “know” a city? Can we even make sense of a metropolis? William James called a baby’s first experiences in the world to be a “blooming buzzing confusion” and I think that it’s an apt description of trying to take in the fullness of a city. It’s an overwhelming task. To find connection and meaning in an urban setting, we blinker our sensations, using moments, glances, and focus. A…

[principleofplenitude]

Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it and, in retrospect, everything that came before.

Suketu Mehta, from Maximum City (2004)

[geopolicraticus]

Painless Civilization and Permanent Stagnation

Kevin Kelly in his What Technology Wants quoted Suketu Mehta about why rural masses move into crowded slums:

As Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai), says, "Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?" Then he answers: "So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment."

(I quote from Kelly’s book because I haven’t read Mehta’s book, and I found the passage in Kelly’s book in the context provided above.)

Many similar points are made in Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser, emphasizing that the poor accept discomfort as the price for pursuing greater opportunity in urban centers. Many cities that attract the rural poor looking to better their condition get a bad rap for their slums, but, under this interpretation, slums are transitional housing for individuals and families bettering themselves, and thus ought to be understood in terms of hope rather than despair. This is counter-intuitive, and also counter to the dominant narrative of slums, but it is worth trying to wrap your head around this different perspective.   

Discomfort is an investment in the future. But what if what economists call positive time preference discounts the future so severely that fewer and fewer are willing make the investment in discomfort in order to obtain a better future? What if the present is good enough?

This has implications for the existential risk of permanent stagnation. What if the society we are all seeking, of peace, prosperity, and plenty for all, would constitute a human condition invidious to striving for a better future, and, as a consequence, this striving comes to an end?

Japanese philosopher Masahiro Morioka has posited the development of what he calls “painless civilization.” In a painless civilization, there is a “preventive reduction of pain” or a “preventive elimination of pain,” and this bias toward the reduction and elimination of pain has subtle but pervasive implications for how individuals are valued. 

Morioka’s argument is deeply embedded in contemporary bioethics. Here is a passage from Painless Civilization and Fundamental Sense of Security: A Philosophical Challenge in the Age of Human Biotechnology by Morioka:

Selective abortion and prenatal screening are good examples of preventive reduction of pain, because by using these technologies we can expect to reduce, in a preventive way, pain and suffering that would be brought about by having disabled babies. We can find a variety of acts of preventive reduction of pain in our society, from daily health care to “preventive war” carried on by the superpowers. A surveillance society that uses security cameras to prevent unforeseen crimes would be another good example. In contemporary society, we are surrounded by a number of devices to reduce pain. I call a “painless civilization” one in which the mechanism of preventive reduction of pain spreads throughout its society. Society in highly industrialized nations is now gradually turning into a “painless civilization.”

I wouldn’t formulate this in quite the same way, but I can see where Morioka is going, and I can see how the argument could be made, irrespective of any stance that one takes on a particular issue in bioethics.

While I am a bit skeptical of Morioka’s argument, I haven’t yet studied it carefully, or thought it through on its own merits, so I remain agnostic for the present time. I think that there are strong counter-examples that could be brought forward, and how Morioka’s concept would handle counter-examples of needless pain and suffering would be significant.

In spite of my skepticism, I see enough of Morioka’s point to understand the connection between the avoidance of discomfort common to both painless civilization and permanent stagnation. In my post A Cost/Benefit Analysis of the End of Civilization as we Know It I wrote:

“...it may be the very dread of suffering that adopting a large-scale solution would bring that may be the occasion of humanity’s failure of nerve — allowing our civilization to be destroyed because we are unwilling to take the necessary action in order to save it. Perhaps the ultimate expression of a civilization in permanent stagnation is not that nothing changes, not an absence of progress, but an unwillingness to endure disruption and discomfort for the sake of survival.” 

We can easily forecast many stages in the future development of human civilization that will cause profound discomfort. If we forgo some future developmental stage because of the moral or physical discomfort that achieving this stage will entail, the development of human civilization will cease.

The early stages of becoming a spacefaring civilization will be littered with discomforts -- those who choose to be the first to go to Mars will travel in cramped ships under uncomfortable conditions, and on Mars will experience numerous privations, and probably also health probems. But if a sufficiently large number of human beings are willing to do this, they will be the foundation of the multiple independent centers of civilization that will be necessary in order for human civilization to survive regional extinction. Discomforts and difficulties of this nature will be iterated at each stage of spacefaring expansion -- the first to move to the outer planets, the first to go to another star, the first to leave the galaxy, and so on.

Besides all these physical discomforts -- among which we should count the inevitable toll of deaths that will occur when technologies fail and accidents occur -- there will be above all moral discomforts. The inventions and institutions that will appear along with the further development of human civilization will make many among us profoundly uncomfortable, and it is easy to see that there will be a significant number of persons who will agitate to end any social experiment that involves morally troubling situations. That is to say, there will be a vested interest -- a moral vested interest -- in securing permanent stagnation as the only acceptable ethical outcome for human society. Our ability to transcend this moral discomfort will spell the difference between a robust and vital civilization on the one hand, or, on the other hand, a moribund, stagnant, and dying civilization.

Broken Overpass, Shaddy Safadi, from “The Last of Us” http://www.intothepixel.com/artwork-details/winner_details.asp?idArtwork=1908

[bigtickhk]

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta https://amzn.to/2QzQmUC

[abelinata]

Tu sei uno scrittore. Dopo aver bevuto, dici a te stesso, Devo scrivere una storia. Se sei un ballerino, dopo aver bevuto ti viene voglia di ballare. Se sei un killer, dopo aver bevuto pensi, Ora ammazzo qualcuno-. Amol flette i muscoli. È ciò che fai, è nella tua natura.

Maximum City, Suketu Mehta

[bombayelectric]

mega // maximum city by suketu mehtu

[idiosyncreant]

via Denizen Magazine

[the-pleiades]

If you are late for work in Bombay, and reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and you will find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train like petals. As you run alongside you will be picked up, and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway. The rest is up to you; you will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed close to the tracks. But consider what has happened: your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts drenched with sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.

Suketu Mehta, from Bombay, meri jaan

[vocasandwhen]

The Common in the City: Mumbai, a conversation with Suketu Mehta and  Parul Sehgal.

“New York is not one word, it is a tapestry of words.” -  Suketu Mehta