A City and Two Sides.

I had written this piece a long time ago, in my summer vacations around an year ago when I visited my cousins in Patna. I happened to read it again and decided to post in up here.

It’s not even been a week here in Patna for me and I can already feel at home here. I agree Patna is not one of the best capitals in the country where one would like to rewind and refresh; you don’t have the benefit of great roads, cleanliness in every nook and corner, smooth driving, first class showrooms and so many more. There is a crowd at every second place, there are people talking way above the normal audible level, at some places there is not even something to call a proper road!

But then there is always a second side to the same coin! The flip-side, believe me, is indeed alluring!  You won’t see it sitting in a part of the city. It won’t come walking towards you to say "hello!"  But having said that, I would also say that goodness and beauty is subjective to every individual, I can only give you an account of how I experienced it in Patna.

Patna is the capital of Bihar. Here, you see people, irrespective of their social standing, enjoying themselves. People here are less bothered about who the president of the USA is, and more concerned if India will win every cricket match it plays. Every small shop has a TV where people flock to see cricket matches and cheer real loud even though they are thousands of miles away from the venue of the match. This is a part of the love and support that the Indian cricket team enjoys in the country.

The languages spoken here are also so diverse. Though my friends group it together saying its Bihari, but hey! That’s not the only language people speak in Bihar. You have Angika, Bajjika, Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili, each enchanting in itself. Each language has a different tone, a different texture and a different feel that it gives to both, the hearer and the speaker. When I think of making a generalization about the feel of the languages I can definitely say that it they are sweet, give a feel of belonging, and want you to understand them(or maybe that’s my minds playing tricks.) Bhojpuri, one of the loved Indian languages has its roots and also its maximum number of speakers, in Bihar, though not in Patna. In Patna, you get to hear almost every of the above mentioned language. The speaker speaks in his language and the listener responds in his, therefore when you go to a shop and speak to the shopkeeper in any language he will invariably respond in his mother tongue. If you, at any given point of time stand in a crowd and listen, you can hear the various languages all in the same crowd.

That’s not all. There’s a lot more than what meets the eye in Patna. I do not want to make it a boring essay by going more into details  but I can surely say that in Patna, yes, there is chaos, but under it there flows calmness and understanding.