A City is changing : Rakhi to rock PATNA , BIHAR

Rakhee Sawant’s the star, Mahindra the hero; you know
a city’s changing…

Everyone on the streets of Patna, it seems, share this strangely endearing, soft, sweet tone in their voices, and their general manners.

It’s probably this gentleness and a humble subservience to fate, I thought, that may have led them to quietly migrate from homes for years, than question, rebel or demand a life they deserved better from.

A similar trait had pushed an MP in Indira’s anarchic India of the 70’s to ask of the Prime Minister, “Why is it that Indians seem to do better under every government of the world, but their own.”I would’ve never noticed Patna’s unique public feature, but for the state’s reputation that precedes its political capital; and that for long, we’ve all become too used to the cussedness, anonymity and aggression of metropolitan jungles.

I’d always want to strike up conversations with whoever I’d meet, mostly just to hear them talk, and often to match my own natural, Bihari accent with theirs. Like it was with the waiter at a relatively swanky yet sparse Samrat Hotel, who volunteered to win me a bet over how the number 9 was written in Devnagari numerals.

Or the chauffeurs who’d drive us around Patna’s equivalent of Lutyen’s Delhi, the plush administrative district, with wide roads, trees on both sides, pointing toward grand colonial structures that make up the Governor’s villa, one that singularly stands out when you view the city from the flight window; the state secretariat, the Chief Minster’s house…

And of course, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s castle, which I could tell, thanks to tourists I was visiting with, should be listed as the city’s prime tourist destination. Everybody seemed eager to check out Lalu’s home. Our driver was happy to play pilgrim. Lalu is all that Patna has been known for about two decades. His fortress, which is officially titled 10 Janpath, or so I am told, didn’t disappoint anyone. It’s neither House No 10, nor on a road called Janpath. If Delhi has a dynasty ruling India from the same address, an equally feudal Bihar must tolerate one of her own.

Lalu, and his ruling louts, already appear history in this ancient town, though it hasn’t been long since he gave up his throne: his famed cow-sheds on the capital’s posh streets have disappeared. The graffiti on walls occasionally speak of restoring lost ‘Bihari pride’; billboards at crowded squares announce cheap cellular phone deals, if not the latest health programme. I’d often ask the cabby about obscure gentlemen carved in black stones at the centre of the city’s various green roundabouts; if he knew who they were. He’d cross them everyday. He had no clue.

It’s easy to sense a negligible interest in politics among the working class in this state; like it’s true for the rest of the country. A high reverence for larger-than-life politicians or celebrity-like bureaucrats is inevitable of course; if you know either, at least your safety, and thereby prosperity, is at lesser risk.

The government, in much of the Third World, much of India, remains the only guarantor to good life. The trouble is a government for over 30 years, without one good intention; splitting up and scaring away ‘subjects’, milking and pillorying the poor, killing their confidence….

Waking up Sunday morning to screaming newspaper headlines about a delicately balanced hope of what Bihar could achieve from Anand Mahindra’s visit (he’s the new hero to Patna; Ratan Tata had left the week before), told me that things may actually be changing here, slowly though. A classified ad on the inside pages, for a forthcoming Rakhee Sawant concert, told me that change may not be as slow. Over the weekend, we’d walked around a mall; been to bars, early evenings, with women friends; been cheated by cabbies and ‘chanawalas’… And I had heard my friends from Bangalore, Delhi and Bombay suggest, “It’s much better than we thought it would be.” If it gets better, we all know how that can save Mumbai or Delhi of a lot of urban burden too.

:- Mayank Shekhar for MUMBAI MIRROR