In Defence of Bihar

http://themadguyspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/06/in-defence-of-bihar.html
skip to main skip to sidebar Sunday, 22 June 2008In Defence of Bihar
Now this is the last straw. I’ve been watching Marathi middle class men sneer at slums and unfeelingly refuse old women seats on the bus in between their Jai Maharashtras and egg on every new demand the MNS makes and enforces with its own sense of ruthless justice. But when I see the same attitudes spill over on HT’s front page, one feels obliged to rage against the machine.
Varghese K. George, the guy who wrote this article, describes Bihar with words like “long considered ungovernable” & “a state long described as a state of mind - for its monumental backwardness - or a basket case”. His article is supposedly on how Nitish Kumar is turning Bihar around, something which doesn’t go well with sections of the Marathi middle class who have been indoctrinated in the art of regional and ethnic hatred. Why does the same journalist who provides an original insight into Nitish Kumar’s modus operandi also seems to be tempered his praise for the Bihar CM and labels Bihar with these vile words? Probably to cater to or insulate himself from a middle class who sends its children to a school system which teaches them to “Bring as many people into Maratha domain as possible; and grow the Maharashtra Creed”
Mr. George cannot deny that the paper he writes for has a huge readership in Mumbai, where some Maharashtrians are claiming sole ownership over a city where they and their ethnic brethren constitute less than half of the population.
I’ve been in Mumbai only for a few weeks, but I’ve seen firsthand the average Mumbaikar’s lack of civic sense and complete ignorance of national history and geography. In the town I grew up in, the government often forgot to build or repair roads, and communities worked together to do fill in the gap and built the roads themselves. In Mumbai, the government doesn’t forget to repair roads that often, but people have no sense of solidarity. They won’t come together to hire six men to repair a twenty foot length of road.
The Marathi middle class conveniently ignores farmer suicides in Vidarbha (and the relative lack of the same in Bihar) and derives its pride from a city which is crumbling with lack of infrastructure and too much corruption, a perceived backwardness of states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh and the rewritten history of a 17th century king which calmly rejects any debate into the effect he and his contemporaries may have had in beginning the end of central authority in our country, mincing it into a nice keema so that the British Invaders could swallow it better.
I can’t understand how a state which spawned something as phenomenal as the JP movement can be called backward by the same people who in 1960 were on the streets shouting “Soo Che? Saru Che? Danda Leke Maaru Che!” as they beat up Gujaratis.
What more can I say? Some people just suck. And yes, when I wrote the word ‘coarse’ in an earlier post, I meant ‘rustic, innocent and unsophisticated in a delightfully endearing way’.


Posted by Atin Bhattacharya at 12:15 PM Labels: India, Pop Sociopolitics, Proof of Disease, Rebel Enthu 0 comments: Post a Comment
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