Bombay Stories

Bombay Stories PDF

Author: Saadat Hasan Manto

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2014-03-25

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0804170614

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A collection of classic, yet shockingly contemporary, short stories set in the vibrant world of mid-century Bombay, from one of India’s greatest writers. Arriving in 1930s Bombay, Saadat Hasan Manto discovered a city like no other. A metropolis for all, and an exhilarating hub of license and liberty, bursting with both creative energy and helpless despondency. A journalist, screenwriter, and editor, Manto is best known as a master of the short story, and Bombay was his lifelong muse. Vividly bringing to life the city’s seedy underbelly—the prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters that filled its streets—as well as the aspiring writers and actors who arrived looking for fame, here are all of Manto’s Bombay-based stories, together in English for the very first time. By turns humorous and fantastical, Manto’s tales are the provocative and unflinching lives of those forgotten by humanity.

Love and Longing in Bombay

Love and Longing in Bombay PDF

Author: Vikram Chandra

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2011-05-05

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0571267165

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Set in contemporary India, Love and Longing in Bombay confirms Vikram Chandra as one of today's most exciting young writers. In five haunting tales he paints a remarkable picture of Bombay - its ghosts, its passions, its feuds, its mysteries - while exploring timeless questions of the human spirit. 'When Midnight's Children first arrived on the scene, it became necessary to revaluate stories from and about India. With Vikram Chandra's collection - his second book - it is time to take stock again . . . Breathtaking.' Observer

Maximum City

Maximum City PDF

Author: Suketu Mehta

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-10-21

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 0307574318

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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.

No Presents Please

No Presents Please PDF

Author: Jayant Kaikini

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 194822691X

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For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.

Ordinary People Extraordinary Stories

Ordinary People Extraordinary Stories PDF

Author: Karishma Mehta

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 939032727X

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Eight years ago, Karishma Mehta founded Humans of Bombay, inspired by the single idea- we all want to be heard. From the first shoot, where she traipsed Mumbai's iconic Marine Drive, asking strangers to speak with her, she's brought together a team of storytellers and a community of over 3.2 million people who believe in the power of humanity. This book, a collection of some of the best stories documented over the last 8 years, is Karishma's love letter to the people of India. Every story in this collection is unique, inspirational, and relatable, and offers a glimpse into a country with 1.3 billion beating hearts ... one tale at a time.

A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance PDF

Author: Rohinton Mistry

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2010-10-29

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1551991381

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A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.

Mumbai Fables

Mumbai Fables PDF

Author: Gyan Prakash

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-10-10

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 069114284X

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Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization. --

Bombay Hustle

Bombay Hustle PDF

Author: Debashree Mukherjee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0231551673

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From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city. Drawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production—finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts—to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.

Breathless in Bombay

Breathless in Bombay PDF

Author: Murzban F. Shroff

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-02-05

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780312372705

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Shroff's vibrant narratives in this concept collection of 14 stories set in contemporary Bombay feature a range of beautifully drawn characters in fascinating situations: from the laundrywallas' water shortage problems, to the doomed love affair of a schizophrenic painter and his Bollywood girlfriend, to the wandering thoughts of a massagewalla at Chowpatty Beach, to the heart-warming relationship of a carriage driver and his beloved horse.

Meet Me in Bombay

Meet Me in Bombay PDF

Author: Jenny Ashcroft

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1250270278

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All he needs is to find her. First, he must remember who she is. Jenny Ashcroft's "Meet Me in Bombay is a powerful, poignant and deeply emotional tale of love, mystery, loss and joy." –Kate Furnivall, New York Times bestselling author It's New Year's Eve in Bombay, 1913, and Madeline Bright, new to the sweltering heat of colonial India, is yearning for all she has left behind in England. Then, at the stroke of midnight, Maddy meets Luke Devereaux, and as the year changes so do both their lives. Bold and charismatic, Luke opens her eyes to the wonders of Bombay, while Maddy's beauty and vivacity captures his heart. Only her mother disapproves, preferring the devoted Guy Bowen as a match for her daughter. But while Maddy and Luke are falling in love, the world is falling apart. World War I is on the horizon, and Luke will be given no choice but to fight. They will be continents apart, separated by danger and devastating loss, but bound by Luke's promise that they will meet again in Bombay.