Word: mehta
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...Living with eight people for five days in the most intimate setting is almost the perfect precursor for getting thrown in with 1,600 people,” 2004 FOP Steering Committee member Neil K. Mehta ’05 said. “It makes you think about every relationship you form...
Here are a few statistics from Suketu Mehta's stunning new book, Maximum City. In some parts of Bombay, you can find 1 million people in a single square mile. Two million of the city's residents lack access to latrines, and the air has 10 times the maximum permissible levels of lead (to breathe it in, as 5 million or more living on the streets do every second, is equivalent to smoking 2 1/2 packs of cigarettes a day). An unusually large number of criminals are either shot in "encounters" or tortured to death in detention in Bombay; four...
...This all has resonance because Bombay, Mehta says, will be the largest city in the world 11 years from now; what happens there is just a more dramatic instance of what happens in Jakarta and Bangkok and La Paz. And the only people maintaining standards and facilities in this Jacobean society are, almost inevitably, members of the criminal underworld, who run things more efficiently than do their government counterparts. Even judges turn to mobsters for help. "Our motto," a criminal overlord tells Mehta, "is insaaniyat, humanity." When an ordinary, law-abiding citizen comes to Bombay from elsewhere, Mehta shows...
...apartments and think, "There but for the grace of God (or India's millions of gods, or luck) go I! At least I live in safety and have more than the one room that is the most that 73% of Bombay families can enjoy." Yet the thrust of Mehta's book, and studies like it, is that every city in the world is being reclaimed by the countryside and, with it, by a more tribal, atavistic form of law and order. Bombay happens to be the place where millions of rural Indians flock; but if they do well enough...
...read Mehta's book, by chance, a few weeks ago in Rio de Janeiro, where 700 favelas, or officially designated slums, spread across the hillsides and seem ready to mud-slide down and swallow up the Sheraton hotel and the condo blocks beneath them. According to one Brazilian friend, 400,000 people arrive at the city's bus station every year, seeking a new life, only to find that all the jobs and houses?and lives?have been taken up by others like themselves. They can survive only by joining the underworld, and a child is seen as irresponsible...