Thanks for taking the time to comment. It was first suggested to me by a friend in , when I was barely a couple of years into crime repor ting, that I should try to write about the history of the.
At the time, I had not even heard of the book; to be honest, I felt it was too colossal. But having put my ear to the ground for Black Friday, I felt ready for a bigger challenge. Initially, I set out to find out why so many Muslim youngsters from. Mumbai were drawn to crime. Was it the aura of Dawood Ibrahim or was it economic compulsion that drew them?
That was the question with which I star ted. And somewhere along the way, I ended up doing what my friend had asked me to do initially. When I set off on the story from Dongri, the metaphor was not lost on my friends. Am I guilty of linking members of a par ticular religion with crime? Bazaar, Umerkhadi, Chor Bazaar, Kamathipura, and all the interweaving cloth and retail markets and masjids.
Tracing the history of Mumbai, historian and researcher Sharada Dwivedi writes that the area was once a flatland and Dongri was a hill; there used to be a. I have shared an excellent relationship, based on mutual respect, with a number of film personalities, though in the present climate of suspicion I would not like to name them.
Only after Reuters filed the story from Mumbai. Is it true that Abu Salem carried out the killing without informing you? The press and the Mumbai police should talk to the people who have publicly claimed to have full knowledge about the killers. These important people are ready to unravel the whole mystery.
The police must now stop blaming me for every death in Mumbai. Thank God I was not around in ; otherwise I would have been blamed for the Partition. Are you financing films? What do you think about Nadeem? Is he innocent or guilty? To the best of my memory I have never met him. Somebody should ask the police to stop chasing shadows. What do you think of Mumbai police? Do you approve of encounter killings? Mumbai police is degenerating. Once the most respected police set-ups in the country, it is now framing false cases and getting innocent people killed in fake encounters.
It is fast losing the respect of Mumbaiites. Which political party you are close to? To tell you very frankly, before the Babri Masjid demolition I used to have pretty liberal political views and had held two different national political parties in very high esteem. After the Babri mosque demolition I have developed this rigid political opinion that the Muslims of India must only associate with the Muslim league.
What do you think of Gawli and Rajan? Arun Gawli and Chhota Rajan, your rivals, who are after your life. My views about them are similar to that of an average Mumbaiite. For me they are street hoodlums. Are you supporting Ashwin Naik? I am a businessman not a don.
Have you ever thought of coming back to India? Several times. Once the government of India withdraws false cases against me, my friends and family members, I will catch the first flight to Mumbai. I will then go and offer my prayers of thanks at the Jama Masjid. After this, he might have spoken to journalists but he never allowed them to publish the conversation as an interview. During the several conversations I had with him, I found him to be an intelligent, witty, and softspoken man.
He displayed a cool, baseline temperament that did not spike at any point during the conversation. He showed no trace of arrogance or power as a don but kept dropping hints and clues of his well-informed network within the police department and his own intelligence network. Dawood did not like any kind of aspersion to be cast against himself, any negative image of himself to be painted. He hated the way in which the Outlook article portrayed him as traitor. He wanted to be the Don. He became numero uno through his skill and a certain amount of luck.
What follows is the tale of all these men and the empires they built. Ask Dawood Hasan Ibrahim Kaskar: he is not just an attestation to this power, he is living testimony to its omnipresence. When Dawood, leader of the infamous criminal outfit D Company, was dubbed a global terrorist by the US Treasury Department in , there were no furrows in the brows of his henchmen, spread all over the globe. He had one in Dubai until , and when he shifted base to Karachi, his new headquarters became The White House; and there was another White House in London.
Like the original White House incumbent, Dawood juggles deals with several countries—the difference being that most of the people he deals with are the shadowy ones who fuel the black economy of most countries. In the years after he left Indian shores in , the ganglord kept pining for his home country and made many attempts to stage a comeback. So while in enforced exile in Dubai, Dawood would recreate India in Dubai or Sharjah, by getting Bollywood stars to dance to his tunes or cricketers to do his bidding in his adopted country of residence.
Dawood had managed a pleasant lifestyle, a home away from home. But he would frequently send feelers about his wish to return to India through some politicians whom he was close to; it would be stonewalled, he would try again, and so on. Then the March serial bomb blasts happened and Dawood realised that he had to finally cut the umbilical cord.
Named as one of the accused, Dawood understood that he had no hopes of ever returning to his motherland. His rise to international fame began after ; until then he was chiefly involved in real estate; gold, silver, and electronics smuggling; and drug trafficking. Dawood loved Mumbai and was the quintessential Mumbai boy, sharing with the city its zeal for living and ability to persist in the face of adversity. On the other hand, Pakistan beckoned and it was offering him refuge, a new name, a new identity, a new passport, a new life, if not much else.
There was a catch of course; he would be a pawn in their hands. But then he was Dawood Ibrahim, he would change Pakistan and make the country dance to his tunes, he thought. Since he held the purse strings, this would not be a problem.
So, leaving his beloved Mumbai behind, he chose to cross borders. In the last forty years, two people have changed the equations between India and Pakistan; one is Dawood Ibrahim and the other was former president of Pakistan General Zia-ul-Haq.
If Zial-ul-Haq got Salafi Islam to Kashmir and changed the Sufi Kashmiris of India by giving more impetus to militancy in Kashmir, Dawood Ibrahim has soured the relations between the two countries to the point of no return. The situation has become a standing joke. The Indian government has been shrilly seeking custody of Ibrahim, and Pakistan, with a straight face, has been denying that he is on their soil. Both countries are aware that Dawood holds the key to the peace process between India and Pakistan.
But when he had a son called Moin, after having had three daughters in a row Mahrooq, Mahreen, and Mazia , he built a sprawling mansion called Moin Palace in the same neighbourhood, in celebration of a long-awaited male heir.
Moin Palace is the most guarded villa in the area today, with a huge posse of Karachi Rangers on round the clock vigil. The house boasts opulent Swarovski crystal showpieces, has a waterfall, a temperature controlled swimming pool, a tennis court, a billiard court, and a jogging track.
His special guests are housed in Moin Palace while other less important ones are accommodated in a guesthouse in the vicinity of the Palace. Obviously, Dawood lives life king size. His dapper suits are from Savile Row, London. A collector of timepieces, he wears exclusive Patek Philippe wristwatches and sometimes Cartier diamond studded ones, all worth lakhs of rupees.
He smokes Treasurer cigarettes and wears Maserati sunglasses, sports shoes from Bally and signs with a diamond-studded pen that must be worth more than 5 lakh rupees. Dawood has a fleet of cars, but moves about in a black bomb-proof Mercedes. When he is on the move a cordon of Pak Rangers escorts him, putting the security of the Pakistani president to shame. Dawood is an insomniac; he drags himself home only in the wee hours of the day if he has not brought the party home already.
He sleeps during the day and works in the evening. He often throws lavish mujras dance recitals for Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats, a former caretaker prime minister of Pakistan included. Those who have met him at his villa say that various chief ministers of Pakistani provinces were found queuing for an audience with him in his waiting hall.
Even those who were made to wait for hours at a stretch did not murmur a word in protest though; one meeting with the don could change their fortunes. He also has a home in Orkazai near Peshawar. Starlets from Pakistan receive his special attention and are more than willing to entertain him. Despite being in Pakistan, he still calls the shots in India. Until some time back, Indian movie moguls and gutkha barons asked him to arbitrate disputes.
And in Mumbai, many businesses—from real estate to airlines—carry the invisible Dawood logo. In that sense, he has not let go of Mumbai. He operates several real estate projects and companies in Mumbai via remote control. The police and politicians from India are still in touch with the don; many policemen in Mumbai have in fact lost their jobs after they were exposed as having links with his gang.
Dawood is 5 foot 11 inches with a menacing gaze. So what makes the man tick? He has presence; there is the way he talks, a kind of charm with a convincing quality about it; our very own Al Pacino. Born on 26 December , Dawood is now 56 years old. Affluence and age have increased his waistline and the paunch is visible though not overly offending. For a man of 56, he looks fit. The boss of the D Company is a billionaire many times over and it is said that his parallel economy keeps Pakistan afloat.
His net worth is allegedly more than 6 billion rupees. He trades in the Karachi bourse and in the hundi hawala system. He has invested heavily in the Sehgal Group and is very close to Javed Miandad, son-in-law of one of the Sehgal brothers.
He has thirteen aliases, one of them being Sheikh Dawood Hassan. In Pakistan, this is his identity. Some of them also call him David or Bhai. In Mumbai or Delhi, when he used to call friends, the person who made the call for him introduced him as Haji Sahab or Amir Sahab. The D Company has many businesses in Mumbai and, it is believed, carries out billions of dollars of operations in Mumbai alone, much of it in Bollywood and real estate.
Dawood is believed to control much of the hawala system, which is a very commonly used unofficial route for transferring money and remittances outside the purview of official agencies. Its turnover is much bigger than Western Union and Moneygram put together. Dawood is the ultimate twenty-first century businessman: ruthless with his competitors but generous to those who are loyal.
He knows how to manipulate relationships with his cadre, the mafia, the terrorist networks, and with the bigwigs in the Pakistan government and the ISI.
Strange that a man with so much talent and potential ended up being an antelope on the savannah, a prisoner of another country, a pawn, one that is being played by both Pakistan and many other countries including the USA, who are aware of his activities in Pakistan.
Strange that the man who had the guts to take on the might of the humongous Pathan syndicate has botched his chances for a life. Dawood has managed to turn the tide in his favour on several occasions in the past. It is said that now, he is deliberately lying low. Empires built with his money would collapse and many skeletons would tumble out of the closet if he was ever brought back home.
The powers that be would rather have Dawood Ibrahim stuck in Pakistan. And so the cult of Dawood will be perpetuated. Movies with his trademark moustache and the cigar tucked in between his lips will continue to be made, and Dawood will be discussed between India and Pakistan forever.
The man, of course, will forever be elusive; the real Dawood may remain a myth. This book is an attempt to understand what is known of him and his world.
The city had earned a reputation for its nurturing abilities, in the E way it welcomes in all newcomers who get the opportunity to grow in their lives. It never seemed short of resources and, despite the influx, it was growing in affluence, power, and importance.
Like in New York of yore, which drew the masses into its embrace, poor youth from all parts of the country were landing in Bombay by the droves. There were few Biharis though, because until then, the Biharis regarded Calcutta present day Kolkata as the golden bowl and refused to look beyond the eastern capital of the country. Uttar Pradesh residents however, were sharp enough to figure out the difference between Calcutta and Mumbai.
After all, Calcutta was more of a socialist set-up, where new enterprises would find it difficult to flourish, unlike in Mumbai. Also, Mumbai has always been the financial capital of the country, and has always been known as the land of opportunity. Escaping a life limited to ploughing their fields, these north Indians rooted for Mumbai hands down.
At the time, the population of south Mumbai was pegged at a meagre two lakh. The north Indian migrants began living in ghettos of their own, divided on the basis of the cities and villages back home. But slowly the boys realised that without education they could not make much headway in the city of gold; thus a few frustrated youth turned towards the task of acquiring easy money. As Napoleon Hill said, necessity may be the mother of invention but it is also the father of crime.
In those days, the easiest crime to perpetrate was accosting late night travellers or families and relieving them of their valuables. The art of picking pockets was yet to be learnt and perfected. Wielding a shiny blade of a knife, sword, or chopper was enough to send shivers down the spine of peace-loving citizens of Mumbai.
The criminals were emboldened when a few crimes went undetected; it was regarded as the success of their modus operandi. And soon, other players entered the fray. According to records maintained at the Byculla Police Station in south Bombay, Nanhe Khan, who hailed from Allahabad, was the first history-sheeter, who threatened people with a long knife and robbed them of valuables. Moreover, Chinka Dada was technologically savvy and possessed something his boss never even dreamt of; two country-made revolvers at the either side, tucked in his belt.
Byculla was regarded as the epicentre of criminal activities at the time. Even in those days, Byculla residents were either Christians or Muslims. The Byculla Police Station divided the stronghold of two communities: the left hand side, that is the east side, which comprised the Byculla zoo and railway station, was the Christian dominion, while the right side, which includes the present day Sankli Street stretching till Byculla station west on one side and Nagpada on the other, was predominantly Muslim.
You cannot have a gang without an adversary gang. While Byculla don Nanhe Khan and Wahab Pehelwan were busy getting their names permanently embedded in the pages of police rosters, three Christian brothers from the Christian portion of Byculla were giving them sleepless nights.
The Allahabadi gang and the Johnny gang often engaged in skirmishes and a miniature turf war soon broke out between them. But when the gang graduated from street-level crime to drug trafficking with the Pathans, they left behind a void in the Byculla area which soon turned into more turf wars between two budding gangs in the area: the Kanpuri gang and the Rampuri gang.
These two gangs, however, could never make it big because they lacked the required chutzpah; the police and the Criminal Investigation Department CID soon neutralised them with quick arrests and an intensive crackdown. The Rampuri gang—before beating a hasty retreat from the Mumbai crime scene—left behind a relic: a long foldable knife with sharp edges on one side.
The knife could be folded and hidden in the trouser pockets and it was meant to be thrust in the rib cage to savagely tear apart the innards of the stomach from one end to another. And to date, the Rampuri Chaaku is the first weapon of the neophyte gangster in Mumbai. None of these turf wars had ever turned very ugly or communal. After the Allahabadi gang bowed out of petty crime, the new incumbent, Ibrahim Dada managed to fend off other gangs on the rise by the sheer force of his charisma.
Rival gangs like Kanpuri, Jaunpuri, and Rampuri had few educated young people in their ranks whereas Ibrahim Dada was the first matriculate amongst them, a well-dressed gangster who could speak English. Popular gangster lore has it that when Ibrahim Dada had gone to the American Consulate at Peddar Road to meet a friend at the consulate he met the receptionist, Maria.
Fair Maria could not resist the raw appeal of the tall, robust, and brawny Ibrahim. It was love at first sight. Soon Maria began visiting Ibrahim at his residence on Sankli Street.
Stop seeing that girl at once. You have loved and not committed a crime, so why hide? It left Johnny fuming and helpless. He tried to scare Maria off by invoking religious sentiments, but to no avail. Soon Ibrahim and Maria were married and the girl embraced Islam. This enraged Johnny Dada, who saw their union and subsequent conversion as a personal humiliation.
Johnny decided to take matters in his own hands. One day when Ibrahim was alone, he cornered him with a group of his hoodlums near Bombay Central station, and assaulted him with lathis, iron rods, and knives. Ibrahim was severely battered at first but soon summoned his reserves of strength and rallied, attacking Johnny and his men.
Though they all escaped eventually, some of them were injured grievously. Ibrahim decided to teach Johnny a lesson. He cornered Johnny in the Kamathipura area one day and challenged him to a one-on-one dual.
Ibrahim beat his adversary mercilessly, humiliating him, and leaving him on the verge of death. His retaliation was finally effected: Johnny then disappeared from the scene. Both his brothers also met an equally tragic end. Chhota Johnny used to terrorise the shopkeepers and loot their cash boxes at the end of the day. The hapless shopkeepers, mere traders by profession, could not summon enough strength or resources to retaliate.
But, the story goes, a Bohra shopkeeper decided to take care of Chhota Johnny at last, even if it meant losing his life in the process. The shopkeeper devised a crude, makeshift weapon by fitting nails on the end of a stick. Chhota Johnny had become so careless in his confidence that unlike others of his ilk he did not even carry any weapons on his person, and when he staggered in, inebriated, the shopkeeper assaulted him mercilessly. He continued to hit him until Chhota Johnny collapsed on the ground in a pool of blood; witnesses recall that he continued to hit him long after he was dead.
Fellow traders were surprised; Bohras are Gujarati Muslims, essentially a trader community found in all corners of the world plying their trade peacefully, simple businessmen who rarely turn violent.
But something in the man had broken, it was evident. The shopkeeper was booked for manslaughter but the police made a weak case against him and let him off. Chikna Johnny, the Casanova of the family, became the ringleader of his own fledgling gang.
His story ended when he failed to return from a picnic with his girls. He had gone to the Gorai beach with some girlfriends and drowned while swimming. With even the runt of the family gone, the gang ceased to exist and its members switched loyalties and merged with other gangs like the Jaunpuri gang, the Kashmiri gang, and some other stray ones.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim Dada was arrested on murder charges in another case and convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maria continued to live in his house at Sankli Street and gave birth to his son. With Ibrahim Dada behind bars, Johnny Dada doing the disappearing act, and the neutralisation of other gangs, the star of the Allahabadi gang of Nanhe Khan was on the rise again.
The gang had grown in size, numbers, clout and money, and came into focus. Kamathipura, incidentally, has attracted gangsters for business as much as for pleasure. The red-light district housed a Kashmiri betting club run by one Sumitlal Shah who was the personal secretary of Habib Kashmiri, head of the Kashmiri gang. Ayyub, incidentally, was also a police informant, much to the chagrin of his gang members.
Once a fight ensued between him and Habib with the latter reprimanding him for telling on the other gangs. Ayyub on his part, was justifying that he did so only to remain in the good books of the cops. However, no consolation would placate Habib and they soon split their gangs. Arriving in , they tried their hand at various odd jobs, finally managing to set up a small mechanic shop where they repaired cycles and two-wheelers in Bengalipura, near Crawford Market.
The father-son duo laboured hard from eight in the morning till late in the night. But 8-year-old Mastan soon realised that even after all this toil, he could only make a meagre 5 rupees a day.
As he walked home to his basti from Crawford Market, he would often walk past the grandiose southern Bombay area of Grant Road, which housed those marvellous theatres, Alfred and Novelty. Every time he noticed a huge, sparkling car whizz past him or walked by the plush Malabar Hill bungalows, he would look down at his dirty soiled hands and wonder if a day would come when he would be able to own these cars and bungalows.
This, more than anything else, stirred a certain feverish desire in him to think of ways and means to become bigger, richer and more powerful. But uneducated and unskilled, with the additional burden of supporting his family, Mastan could see only a bleak road ahead of him.
When the boy turned 18, he boldly decided to quit the cycle repairing business for good to try his hand at something else. While allowing him to join the workers at the Bombay docks, he reminded Mastan that he had brought him up right and that he would not be around forever to supervise him all the time; hence Mastan must refrain from stealing, fighting, and using dishonest means to better himself.
In , Mastan joined the Bombay dock as a coolie. His job was to unload huge boxes and containers of ships coming from Eden, Dubai, Hong Kong, and other cities. Bombay was not such a large dock at that time but it was still bustling with activity.
As India won its freedom in , Mastan completed three years as a coolie, at the Mazagon docks in Bombay. Mastan, in those three years, saw that the British used to charge import duty and that there was a good margin to be made if this import duty could be evaded.
In those days, Philips transistors and imported watches were hugely popular in Bombay. Mastan realised that if the goods were never passed through custom, there would be no question of duty, and so, he could instead make a quick buck by passing this evasion on to the owners.
And if he helped the owners evade customs duty, they would give him a cut, which, taken into account the numerous goods passing through the customs, turned into quite a substantial amount of money for Mastan. To him, this was really not a question of honesty.
He believed customs duty was a British legacy and could be justifiably evaded. Mastan knew that if he could manage to import these transistors and watches without paying import duty, he could make a small fortune for himself, which would supplement his salary of 15 rupees per month. While he thought out this devious scheme, he serendipitously met a man named Shaikh Mohammed Al Ghalib, an Arab by descent.
Ghalib was also looking for someone young and energetic who was willing to support him in his illegal activity of evading import duty. At the time, smuggling was not a full-fledged activity and people were not yet aware of the massive amounts of money they could make in the business. The only smuggling operations that existed consisted of small-timers trying to bring in imported goods in permissible quantities, which back then consisted of such prize catches as six watches, two gold biscuits, four Philips transistors, and so on.
Ghalib explained to Mastan that it would be easy for him to stash a couple of gold biscuits in his headband, a few watches in his underwear, or a couple of transistors in his turban, as he was a coolie and worked on the ground.
Mastan asked him what he would get in return for the work. Ghalib promised him a good reward. Both struck up a good rapport and decided to work together. Within months, Mastan realised that his measly salary of 15 rupees had now become 50 rupees.
He was now a coolie to watch out for. Importantly, his reputation and the fact that he enjoyed special treatment by an influential and affluent Arab caught the attention of local hoodlums. One such dada or local goon was Sher Khan Pathan, who at the time used to have his way at the Mazgaon dock. These were the days when there was no unionism at the dock.
He would extort money from coolies and anyone who refused to pay would be beaten up by Pathan and his men. Mastan witnessed this day in and day out. He wondered why someone like Pathan who did not belong to the docks and was not even a coolie or a government servant should be allowed to come to the docks and threaten and extort money from hard working coolies.
Enterprising lad that he was, he decided to take on Khan. Mastan gathered a couple of other strong people, sat with them, and told them that Sher Khan Pathan was also a human being like them. If Sher Khan could beat them up with his own hands, they had the stronger hands of labour: they were tougher and used to hard work.
If their strength could collectively be channelled to beat up Pathan and his goons, the coolies could ensure that their community was relieved of the goons. Next Friday, when Pathan came for his weekly round of extortion, he realised that ten people were missing from the huge queue.
Before he could get a grip of the situation, Mastan and ten of his men attacked Pathan and four of his cronies. Pathan had his Rampuri knife and guptis stiletto and Mastan and his people had lathis and rods.
Pathan had only four men, while Mastan had ten. Finally, a bleeding and battered Pathan and his acolytes had to run for their lives. Soon after, in , Morarji Desai, the chief minister of Bombay presidency, imposed prohibition of liquor and other contraband in the state. With such imposition in place, the mafia had a brilliant opportunity to increase their profits—provide the illegal goods not available to interested customers at exorbitant prices.
This was the time when Ghalib and Mastan came into their full form. Within months of the imposition, they started raking in money. Mastan bought himself a bicycle. Soon, he managed to buy a house of his own. He became the leader of the coolies in the early fifties, but his joy did not last long.
The thought of whether he should use the money to get more material from Eden or whether he should leave the box intact for Ghalib to return tormented him for a while. Tempted as he was, Mastan did not embezzle the money.
The box remained in his house—hidden and untouched. Ghalib had been sentenced to three years imprisonment. Mastan returned to his life of helping small-time coolies and smugglers for these three years. Ghalib, after he served his sentence returned a broken man. In those three years, he had suffered huge losses fighting his case. His family was also in trouble. He was contemplating investing in horses for the derby, or starting a hotel or even relocating to Dubai, which was his hometown.
Biography, Criminal Novels, Secret Agencies,. Hussain Zaidi and foreword by Vikram Chandra. We have collected all the episodes, transcribed the book and named the book as "Dongri Ta Dubai".
Dawood Ibrahim who is still absconding and the so-called Mumbai Police did not arrest him yet. Dawood Ibrahim is now residing in Dubai. Daud Ibrahim in Dubai during the Walima ceremony of his daughter but the plan was badly exposed. By reading this book you will discover more about the crime graph of Mumbai and Mr. Dawood Ibrahim who is best known as a Don in India.
Many Indian Politicians and Bollywood acters afraid and respect the Don. It is the story of notorious gangsters like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, Varadarajan Mudaliar, Chhota Rajan, Abu Salem, but above all, it is the story of a young man who went astray despite having a father in the police force. This story is primarily about how a boy from Dongri became a don in Dubai, and captures his bravado, cunningness, focus, ambition, and lust for power in a gripping narrative.
Score: 2. Dawood's own deputy turned arch-rival Chhota Rajan, thug-turned-politician Arun Gawli, Amar Raavan Naik and his engineer brother Ashwin Naik, and a host of other characters, big and small, walk the pages of this compelling history of the Maharashtrian mobsters who were once dubbed 'amchi muley', 'our boys', by Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray.
Equally fascinating are the stories of the famous - and infamous - policemen and 'encounter specialists' who took the gangs on with great success and not too many scruples. Violence and deceit one expects to read of, but the strength of this book is also its ability to capture the mundane - almost naive - beginnings of what very quickly became the organized crime and brutal vendettas that held Mumbai to ransom through the last decades of the twentieth century.
Meticulously researched and thrillingly told by the acknowledged expert on the underworld, this is faster-paced than Dongri to Dubai, and even more chilling in its implications for India and the subcontinent. Instead, what he gets is a mentor who eventually transforms him into a cunning mafia boss.
In Dawood's Mentor, Dawood meets Khalid and they eventually forge an unlikely friendship. Together they defeat, crush and neutralize every mafia gang in Mumbai. Khalid lays the foundation for the D-Gang as Dawood goes on to establish a crime syndicate like no other and becomes India's most wanted criminal.
It is an in-depth analysis of major events that shaped the history of contemporary India. Epochs of history include the partition of Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. A look at the two-part defense of Hinduism by Shashi Tharoor is a highlight. An evaluation of the Communist, Hindutva and Mandal movements is undertaken. The reviews have a personal touch as the author has thought out of the box to add his opinion to many a contentious issue at hand.
In that sense it is not a review but a critical narrative with the book acting only as a template with the discussion many a time spilling beyond the confines of it.
It is not just a big city but also a soaring vision of modern urban life.
0コメント