Death In Mumbai

Three years ago, the brutal killing of a young TV producer called Neeraj Grover sent shockwaves through Mumbai. An alluring aspiring actress, Maria Susairaj, and her dashing naval officer boyfriend, Emile Jerome, were accused of killing him and hacking his body into pieces, before setting it on fire. The cast of characters was young, attractive, and upwardly mobile, the press hungry for a headline. As details of the case unravelled, the questions flew around—what had gone wrong? What made these young professionals turn to violent crime? Was it the savage pressure of the city, or was the motive even darker? This book will shock and inspire a much needed change in perception of celebrity culture and Bollywood. It’s about so much more than a contested killing case and will be a talking point for years to come.

As a private detective in Calcutta she had impressed maverick security expert Shayak Gupta with her sleuthing skills, leading to a new job with his firm Titanium. Now in Mumbai, Reema is given the case of the year - the murder of Ashutosh Dhingre, former assistant to fading Bollywood superstar Kimaaya Kapoor. The location of the crime is Kimaaya's private island. The suspects - her house guests, and Kimaaya herself! Reema learns of Kimaaya's prior relationship with Shayak, and can't help but think it is a conflict of interest. Equally puzzling is Shayak's repeated absence. And what of the continuing attraction simmering between her and her secretive boss? Despite the state-of-the-art facilities at Titanium, Reema is soon back to her own devices - which sometimes involves cooking up something for a spot of culinary meditation - to get to the bottom of a crime that points to a deep and sinister plot. As the body count increases, can Reema crack the case before more blood is spilled?

"Radhi returns home to Mumbai to lick her wounds after a failed relationship and a bout of writer's block, but she soon gets caught up in the tangled mystery surrounding the death of her best friend's father. Radhi’s pregnant best friend Sanjana’s father is found dead in his study. Everyone says it’s suicide. And yet, just hours before, he was telling Sanjana that he couldn’t wait to hold his grandchild in his arms. Something feels off to Radhi. Her suspicions are further raised by the surly cook and timid young maid’s odd behaviour. And who did the second cup of tea on his desk belong to? Radhi is determined to uncover the truth. But the deeper she digs beneath the diamond-studded prayer meetings and the lavishly catered ‘pure-veg’ brunches, the faster she finds herself drawn into a web of festering grievances, hidden agendas and long-buried secrets. As the intense Indian summer draws to an end and the monsoon sets in, Radhi risks everything to find out the truth"--

How do you tame a wild virus in a city of 12 million people? This petrifying thought was at the top of many minds when the first two cases of coronavirus were detected in Mumbai on March 11, 2020. Covid-19, which had brought big nations with robust health systems down to their knees, soon found its way to Mumbai’s densest localities, including Dharavi. The coronavirus pandemic was Mumbai’s fourth encounter with a health emergency of an overwhelming scale. In 1896, the city had fought the bubonic plague. In 1918, the deadly Spanish Flu swept the city. Ninety-one years later, Mumbai was once again in the grip of a virus- Influenza H1N1. Then came the coronavirus, the biggest pandemic of the 21st century yet. Suresh Kakani’s Mumbai Fights Back offers a blow by blow account of the challenges and triumphs of India’s richest civic body in fighting an invisible enemy for two years. From erecting mammoth field hospitals on open grounds to guaranteeing beds for every patient, the book rivetingly chronicles the united efforts by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai to curb the transmission and save lives.

This book focuses on interdisciplinary issues of human health in the changing urban environments of India’s largest megacities—Delhi and Mumbai. The authors explore human health concerns related to increased temperatures and air pollution in these cities in a study based on primary data collected through interviews, as well as secondary data on causes of mortality from 2001 to 2012. During this period, the surface temperatures for both megacities were mapped using Landsat Images. The rapidly increasing populations of cities and urban centers alter ecosystem services such as water, air and land cover, with disastrous impacts on health and wellbeing, particularly in megacities. In 2015, polluted air was estimated to have been responsible for 6.4 million deaths worldwide, and it is projected that it will cause between 6 and 9 million deaths per year by 2060. In 2017, outdoor air pollution resulted in 1.2 million deaths in India and brought about a 3% loss in GDP. The increase in population, vehicles, and industries has led to changes in land use and land cover and a rise in city temperatures and air pollution, creating urban heat islands (UHIs). Together, UHIs and air pollution have damaging impacts on human health that range from stress and headache to asthma, bronchitis, and chronic diseases, and even to death. Delhi has been experiencing emergency conditions in terms of environmental health over the past two years. At the same time, both the Delhi and Mumbai urban agglomerations are growing at a rapid pace, and the United Nations has projected that they will be the second and third most populous cities in the world by 2025. In this context, the book offers significant insights into the past patterns and responses to the present global urban health emergencies, and explores sustainable means of combating the problem to enable college and university researchers to develop innovative solutions. Further. It presents trans-disciplinary research that cuts across the WHO Action Plan, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and Habitat III to help policymakers gain a better understanding of the global challenges of urban health and wellbeing. The book is especially useful for students and researchers in geography, urban demography, urban studies, environmental studies, health sciences, and policy studies.

Harvard Public Health Magazine, Best Public Health Books and Journalism of 2022 The definitive social history of tuberculosis, from its origins as a haunting mystery to its modern reemergence that now threatens populations around the world. It killed novelist George Orwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, and millions of others – rich and poor. Desmond Tutu, Amitabh Bachchan, and Nelson Mandela survived it, just. For centuries, tuberculosis has ravaged cities and plagued the human body. In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk-remedies, made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West. The cure was never available to black and brown nations. And the tuberculosis bacillus showed a remarkable ability to adapt – so that at the very moment it could have been extinguished as a threat to humanity, it found a way back, aided by authoritarian government, toxic kindness of philanthropists, science denialism and medical apartheid. Krishnan’s original reporting paints a granular portrait of the post-antibiotic era as a new, aggressive, drug resistant strain of TB takes over. Phantom Plague is an urgent, riveting and fascinating narrative that deftly exposes the weakest links in our battle against this ancient foe.

WINNER OF THE 2012 LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2012 US NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 PULITZER PRIZE From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo comes a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the world’s most lively but treacherous cities. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport and, as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees ‘a fortune beyond counting’ in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter — Annawadi’s ‘most-everything girl’ — will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a 15-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call ‘the full enjoy’. But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi. With intelligence, humour, and deep insight into what connects human beings in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the 21st century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget. PRAISE FOR KATHERINE BOO ‘Boo's meticulous work is a must for India watchers, of course, but it is also a great example of the power of what used to be known as immersion journalism. And a cracking read.’ The Age ‘[An] exquisitely accomplished first book.’ The New York Times