I dared to go for an unpleasant verbal battle with few of my friends during my morning walk today, when one of them sarcastically talked about ‘the reality show on the street of Patna’. And on return I underwent the worst possible mental agony. Why does it happen only with Patna and Bihar? Why can’t Bihar change? If it can happen in Patna where the protectors of the people- the top police and administrative and political heads of Bihar live, it can very easily happen anywhere in Bihar. And this time, it was a group of young men who appeared to be educated enough. Why is the youth so shameless? How can be the police so tolerant and inactive? How could the crowd keep on watching the horrendous scene? How could several national TV news channels be showing it for so long and police could remain inert? Were the TV crews called to cover the drama challenging the authority to show what they can?
I am not a Lalu-baiter. But I feel like asking Nitish Kumar as well as Police Chef Gautam, “What right they have to be present in Patna if such incident keeps on happening?” What is the need of any probe in such a case that has all the footage of video available as one in case of Varun? Why can’t all the persons seen on screen be put behind the bar as first thing? Why can’t the kings of Patna pass a single line order to the police force that this sort of incident can’t anymore be tolerated? I was very happy last week when Bihar got a great coverage of its great sons. Pranab Mukherji referred to Kautilya twice in his budget speech. This is the centenary year of the discovery of Kautilya’s Arthshasthra. It was the first time, the manuscript of the treatise on politics and governance, believed to have been written circa 4th century BC, was found and identified by Rudrapatna Shamashastry, a scholar of Sanskrit who was the librarian and later the curator of the Oriental Research Institute (ORI). Mysore. Unfortunately, Bihar and his present rulers hardly respect or even remember the person known as Chanakya, Vishnugupta, or Kautitlya and whose name may cause shivers even today among the wrongdoers of the nation. May be, it is again because of the caste of Kautilya. And then came the solar eclipse and the name of Taregna got known. Taregna that was a sleepy village till recently got known all over the world overnight and with that came the remembrance of the ancient astronomer Aryabhatta who had studied the heavens 1,500 years ago and set up his observatory here. It was NASA who could bring Taregna to the people of India and not any Indian agency. Should not the Bihar’s administration learn something from these sons of ancient Bihar? Why can’t Bihar administrators learn to be ruthless from Kautilya to make a perceivable change of the image of Bihar? Why can’t Bihar chief minister himself an engineer, go all out for the propagation of science and technology education in the state? Will Nitish’s announcement of the “knowledge university” in Taregna in the name of Aryabhatta get materialized and be a globally recognized institute of excellence? My doubt is because of a poor report about Chandragupta Institute of Management in press that was to become the IIM of Bihar, and I still don’t find the name of Kautilya Law School in the top law schools of the country. Will Bihar change and allow the Non Resident Biharis to live wherever they are with raised heads? I appeal to all the young men and women in Bihar to consider our feelings. Let them make their names known with some real achievements. I.R. Sharma
