The Bihari

At the onset, let me give a brief background about where my roots are and why I say what I am going to say.

Baba was born and brought up in a pretty affluent family by Bihar standards, in a place called Siwan, which is by far the most gruesome example of a plagued Bihar town nowadays. Anyways, he completed his engineering, had a very bad patch during the JP movement when in between college he was left without classes/aim/motivation for a complete year, and then by dint and effort, landed up a job in Maharashtra State Electricity Board. He since then migrated out to Maharashtra and I was born and brought up there. As I always put it, I have been fortunate enough to have had the best of both the worlds: the Bihari mindset of working hard and respect and the Maharashtrian way of living fast and ensuring that the dearth of facilities like electricity and water don't come in the way of your progress.

Coming back to the point. I am a proud Bihari. Proud of my roots. Proud enough to engage in a furios debate with anyone who thinks otherwise of Bihar. Since my childhood I have been mocked at by fellow kids who always equated Bihar with 'a land of fat, stupid, dumb idiots.' I don't think I am as angry on them as I used to be when I was a kid because none of us mature enough then. But nowadays, it pains sometimes when grown-ups have the same kind of attitude. For someone who is reading these lines, it might occur that I am a big champion of Bihari sentimentalities and am overlooking the problems that has led Bihar to the state it is in today. Read on.

When I was a kid, I used to see that we rarely locked our homes in Maharashtra with 4-5 locks, as my Nani and Dadi used to do in Patna and Siwan. In Maharashtra, my sister and I were allowed to play in the open till late in the evening and were free to roam about. In Siwan however, Maa closely guarded us both. My chacha used to call me 'Disco Bhateeja' because I was a 'Bambaiya' (I have never lived in Mumbai, but to every person in Bihar, a Maharashtrian means a 'Bambaiya'). I was warned not to move around in T- Shirts and jeans for the fear of getting kidnapped. I was utterly confused. The open fields of Siwan, the wells, the river that went through the city, the ghats where we used to go for 'Chatth Pooja': these were better places to have fun and play ass kids than the concrete jungles of the cities of Maharashtra. I have seen kids aged 10-12 dying of meningitis because they couldn't get medicines on time. The last time I went to Siwan, it took me 8 hours for a 120 kms journey. That was 3 years ago. Things, I have heard, haven't changed.

I love the Bihari accent that has come to face severe contempt and scorn. It is a symbol of the Bihari stupidity. Why? Because it sounds funny. Why does it sound funny? Because most of the Hindi movies always had a village bumpkin who acted stupid irrespective of where in India he cam from, (it could have been Gujarat or Rajasthan), he always spoke in (distorted) Bhojpuri. (To all those misinformed people, there is no such dialect or language such as 'Bihari'. What it is confused with most often is 'Bhojpuri'). Why did it so happen that almost always the court jester was a Bihari? Because: look around you. Look at the number of Biharis around you. Because its the mass present everywhere. Be it a mason working to build your house (when we built our own house in Nasik, the mason, the carpenter and everyone involved were Biharis. Why? Because there weren't any other available), or your District Magistrate or the person who's blog you are reading now. Well, I will not be foolish to claim that 'we' are the single largest community and so on. But please recognise the penetration, right from rock bottom to the top.

But haven't we Indians mocked every community amongst ourselves? Sardars, gults, bangalis, tams, kannadigas, marathis.. the list is endless. I personally have had a taste of all this being in IIT Kharagpur, truly a diverse place. The point remains that whether it hurts a Sardar as much as it does a Bihari when you tease them?

Coming back to the language and the customs. How much I hate the fact that I don't have that kind of accent that Baba or chachaji has. Baba always says that Bhojpuri is dead. His generation was the last to speak proper Bhojpuri now. It has now become corrupt. What hasn't become corrupt in Bihar? Corruption has reached every place that it can. I always thought that Maharashtra was a very nicey-nicey state. However, you can find corruption in Maharashtra also. There are problems that persist in equal quantities in both the states. But, it is how the people deal with the situation that differs in both the places. In Maharashtra, if you pay the bribe, you actually can expect to get your work done. Not that I endorse such a practice, but in Bihar, there's no guarantee that such a thing can take place.

In Bihar, a threshold has been crossed wherein no one follows any rules nowadays because no one 'else' follows any rules nowadays. I remember how a very rich guy with a starched kurta and a golden chain dangling in his neck, spat publicly on Patna Railway station, caring zilch about the people surrounding him. Such a thing would have evoked atleast a protest from people in Nasik or Mumbai. But there is again a difference. If someone is in some kind of a problem, people in Maharashtra will not take notice, but in Bihar, people will indeed ask.

I often ask this question to myself: I am a proud Bihari, but what Bihari do I represent? The Bihari who stays back in Bihar, works the shit out of himself but still problems of caste, economy and corruption prevent him from progressing, or those who directly or indirectly have come out of that hole and with their persistence and hard work, have made a name for themselves. The answer is obvious.

What is bad is the current situation in Bihar. In a way, us Biharis, the great migrant populace can be blamed for it. They say that the talent is out of Bihar. And that's why Bihar is in a bad state. No. Biharis aren't genetically much different from other communities. The emerging socio-economic conditions of the post independence era made life difficult for people and they went out and progressed. I guess something similar would have happened had Andhra would have got a Lalu Yadav as a CM. Conditions became averse and the same people fought hard against the system and won and became known. However, its the failures that the junta always remembers and not the successes.

Coming to the conclusion: I have just one request to you all. Whenever you deal with me, deal with me as Siddharth Seth, not as a Bihari, or an Indian, or an RPian, or a KGPian, or a THOKa.. the list is endless. Treat me for what I am. I am made up of 'all' of these things and not just one of them. I am a proud Bihari, a proud Indian and a proud lots of things. I wouldn't want to go and prove to every Tom Dick and Harry about my group identification. Tell me when I am wrong, why I am wrong. Don't discard my mistakes as being mistakes because I belong to a particular community. Criticize me individually for my mistakes. Never blame an entire community for the mistakes or wrong doings of a few. Remember a cult or a group for all the good things that it did as a group.

Check your watches, you are in the 21st Century...

Comments invited. They will go a long way in teaching me.