BOOK REVIEW | Good Reads
A City on the Sea!
M
umbai has been recently in the news due to the dreadful cyclonic attack of ‘Nisarga’ which eventually did not much damage the iconic city. But the Maharashtra capital keeps making news round the year. In 2020, it has become the Corona capital of India. In most top countries, two important cities stand out, despite their basic differences on parameters like size, shape and population etc. They include, for example, New York City and Washington (US) or Beijing and Shanghai (China) or Melbourne and Sydney (Australia), to name just a few. In India, they are Mumbai and Delhi--both having their own specialities, strong and weak points, besides their beautiful historic backgrounds and special geographic features. In the series of my city-centric book reviews, I have perhaps done more ‘justice’ to Delhi than Mumbai, incidentally, my birth place. I may have introduced about 10 or more
books written on various facets of the national capital but comparatively much fewer on Mumbai’s life and history. In the meanwhile, I also took the readers of Urban Update to Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. The last time I wrote about Mumbai was two years ago (Zero Point Bombay-a collection of knowledgeable essays) but surely that does not indicate there is any dearth of books on this lovely city which patronises sports and cinema, theatre and crime, politics and trade...all simultaneously and in a big way. In the interesting book under review, I would like to write something about the urban perspective which the author has provided through a well written chapter--Planning and Dreaming. That takes us back into times of the last century when urban planning was in its infancy in independent India. “The elevation of the planners authority, ironically, came close on the heels of independence in 1947. Cities had started receiving flocks of men and women in search of economic opportunities. Bombay’s population grew from 1.49 million in 1941 to 2.3
Book Mumbai Fables Author Gyan Prakash Publisher HarperCollins Pages 396 Price `425/
44 June 2020 | www.urbanupdate.in
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Abhilash Khandekar Senior Journalist
million in 1951 “ says the author. The surging urban population sharpened the sense of an urban crisis. JF Bulsara, a commentator on urban affairs, bemoaned “two hundred and eighty seven years of unplanned building”. His text catalogs Bombay’s problems-its haphazard growth, the “cheerless chawls and bleak block houses,” the amorphous architectural map and a preponderant illiterate population that lacks of art of living together in the city and whose primitive mental condition aggravates the problems of filth, the book talks about Bombay in the forties. Besides Bulsara, local newspapers were hinting at the mounting disorder in the city. Bombay which went through a building boom in the thirties and the forties, had a sizeable number of engineers and architects who also expressed concern about the city’s future. Author Gyan Prakash who spent 10 years in writing this book after
