Book Review: Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia
-- Hussain Zaidi

Dongri is a small area in South Mumbai. The book is about how Mumbai Mafia reached Dubai from Dongri over the last 6-7 decades. It is an elaborate (~400 pages) biographic account of several (in)famous underworld dons like Hazi Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar, Kareem Lala, Chota Rajan, Chota Shakeel, Abu Salem and of course Dawood Ibrahim.

Author is a well known crime reporter and was the privileged one to interview Dawood a few years back, which was the last time Dawood ever spoke to media. He sourced the information from various dossiers made by Indian Govt. to Pakistan Govt. requesting extradition of Dawood Ibrahim and from the compilations of various retired officers of Mumbai Police.

While going through the biographies of those dons and in turn evolution of Mumbai Mafia, readers would be dumbstruck, to put it mildly. It has all the elements of any fictitious crime story and extremely violent Hollywood movie, and things that one normally brushes aside as just figments of writer's imagination and just impossible to pull off in real life, except that all those were real. Electronics, gold, gutka, real estate, extortion, betting (Cricket), Bollywood... where ever there was some money, there were empires created by these guys. And, there were jurisdictions and deadly territorial feuds. There were dons created and patronized by senior police officers to take on bigger dons, there were dons killed with a tip-off from their ladyloves, there were shootouts that lasted hours in broad day light in residential neighborhoods of Mumbai, there were dons who shift bases among several countries with an ease that it sounds like a backpacker's pub crawl, there were politicians who ordered arrests and simultaneously tipped and helped the criminals get out of the country forever, and there were police officers who shot dead 100+ criminals each, over a period of just a few years. 

Author presents several hard to digest events in chronological order starting from 1950 till today. As I read somewhere, politics of any country are beyond the comprehension of a common man. After reading such biographical accounts, one would realize, so is crime.

Book Review: Life is What You Make it

Life is What You Make it
--- Preeti Shenoy


It is a short story about an young, beautiful, intelligent and desirable girl, who goes from topping her class in first semester of MBA in a prestigious school to spending a few months in a psychiatry ward with a bipolar disorder in a whisker.

The take away is just as simple as the title. Ankita, the main character of the book, gets carried away by her ambitions and achievements and starts disparaging the little and precious pleasures of life, to the extent that even suicide of a close friend, with whom she was in a relation, doesn't move her much. But, that single minded pursuit of material soon takes toll on her, and vents itself out as a mental disorder, when she reaches the threshold.

With the help of an excellent counselor, she reclaims her life back and realizes that life is after all what you make it.

A very simple read. Though the pacing is not very good with story moving very fast at some parts while some parts are just dragged, it is an enjoyable read.