Watching a movie like The Lunchbox, or other more classic Bollywood films, allows the viewers to escape their situation where the booming and high-profit making film industry strengthens the socio-economic inequality already present in Mumbai. The only realistic mention of Mumbai’s economic disparities in the film comes about when Fernandes passingly reflects that most people in the city can only afford to eat a banana or two for lunch. Fernandes likely walked past every single day on his way to work (3). The film shows a quirky and magical Mumbai completely bereft of the human suffering that Mr. Though not exactly a Bollywood film, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox isn’t a bad example of this viewpoint. A scene where Mehta writes about the huge crowd that gathered and swarmed around an actress during a filming stands out, as it is apparent that this escape has become an obsession for Bollywood fans (2).

For Bollywood fans, the reality espoused through cinema does not need to line up at all with the reality of Mumbai the films represent an escape from the socioeconomically unjust situation of modern Mumbai. Discussing the primary audience of Bollywood films, the lower and lower-middle classes, Mehta writes “ want to see an urban, affluent, glossy India, the India they imagine they grew up in” (2). We get a taste of this socio-economic divide in Suketu Mehta’s novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found when the author goes into detail on the booming Bollywood film industry in Mumbai. Looking at a map of Mumbai, it is apparent that the slums directly abut some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. Immediately, Mumbai, the richest city in India yet replete with sprawling slums and shantytowns, comes to mind. In her strictly economic analysis of global cities, Sassen claims that in global cities, “the growing number of high-level professionals and high-profit making specialized service firms have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socio-economic inequality evident in these cities” (1). As the rich got richer, the poor were forced furthe to the margins of society and massive socioeconomic inequality emerged. Tapping into the riches of the subcontinent allowed the Portuguese to build up Bombaim as a world-class trading port.

Maximum city bombay lost and found