Current Reading

Finished Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers last night. It is a book about bankers and the frauds of high finance, definitely not the Wall Street and Trading types. Found it a bit on the slower side, perhaps because it is an old book. All-in-all Hailey did not impress me that much.

What I certainly am impressed with are the first few pages of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. This one’s about the enigmatic city of Mumbai/ Bombay/ Bambai – call it what you want. Mehta’s family migrated from Kolkata to New York, with a decade’s stopover at Mumbai. It was enough to hook Mehta to the city for the rest of his life. The book takes a first person look at the dreamland and succeeds in creating a true-to-life mural resplendent in its myriad hues.

Also read Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker sometime back. This one’s an out and out Wall Street drama, fed live from the 41^st floor of Salomon Brothers in its heydays – when bond traders were the kings and equity departments relegated practically to the backrooms in faraway Atlanta.

On the radar for the immediate future – India: A wounded Civilization by VS Naipaul, Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein.