[Draft] Bihar Diwas 2024
Without getting Bihar right, human flourishing in India is impossible; and, without getting India right, human flourishing is impossible globally.
Jalebis in Edison (New Jersey)
I love action movies, and when I saw Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider on Amazon Prime last night, I felt as if I had no choice but to see the movie. Coincidently, the word ‘Patna’ popped up on the screen a few times, I had to rewind the movie to ensure that I was not imagining Patna while watching the movie. Patna popping up in the background of the movie took me back to the day I drove to experience Patna in the US. It was almost five years back when I drove from New Haven, Connecticut, to Edison, New Jersey, to eat gudwali jalebi.
The only time I had one gudwali jalebi before was in Patna one evening while I was playing at a friend’s house when I was in my early teens. I had befriended a girl who was visiting from Mauritius to spend time with her relatives, who were my neighbors. Her mother bought jalebis from a hawker and gave me a piece, too. I still remember the taste.
I had not seen a dark-brown jalebis before and wondered how it would taste. And what an earthy and ethereal taste it was!
After I started working, I kept looking for gudwali jabelis wherever I went and never found one. One day I shared my longings for gudwali jalebi with a friend while talking about the movie, Lion. My friend told me that it was available in Edison, New Jersey. I became restless when I heard about the possibility of recreating the intensity of my first experience after almost a few decades in the US. I immediately hopped into my car and drove to Edison. About half an hour before the destination, a song started to play on the FM Radio that I found so passionately haunting that I pulled to the side to listen to it. Later I found that the song ‘Survivor’ was from the movie, Tomb Raider of Alicia Vikander. For one reason or another, I never found the opportunity to watch the movie until the last night—on the eve of the 2024 Bihar Diwas.
A Psychopath in Bihar
Given what has been unfolding in Bihar since the entry of Robert Clive in 1764—a psychopath, it is hard to know what to feel about the creation of a separate state of Bihar in 1912.
I had to look up the exact year of Bihar's creation; I was under the impression that it was 1937. I guess the reason could be that 1937 was the year my father was born. One reason that I found a renewed commitment to the development of Bihar was my father and the way he lived in Bihar.
Bihar was born on March 22, 1912.
A distinct identity emerges when historical memory finds a special and deep commitment to how to be in this world. Though the epicentre of the forces to weaken India by weakening the Bengal Province emanated from the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905, it was the unfair treatment meted out by the British to the natives of the Bihar region that saw the reinforcement of the ancient and a separate identity.
Bihar’s Journey Since 1912
And what a journey it has been so far…
A state so rich culturally and civilizationally that it has been forced to nurture the whole of India like a canonical Bhartiya maa (mother), feeding her offspring at the cost of her own health and well-being.
Be it the way the British sucked the Bihar region for opium, sugar, indigo, cotton, and gun-power production, severely damaging the soil nutrition while heavy taxation ensured no reliable capital formation; or, the policy of freight equalization incentivising industries to move to other states; or, for that matter, the effort to save Indian democracy raising the political consciousness of Bihar to the extent that Bihar started to devour itself in the absence of credible opportunities.
Self-Devouring Bihar
Given my background in economics, many inquire about the future of Bihar. Modern economics may not be of much assistance in this case.
Once in Rwanda in 2015, I asked Prof. Elizabeth Bradley, with her many years of exposure to Africa and many other countries, what she would do to ensure human flourishing in Africa had she been the most powerful and benevolent person in the whole of Africa; her response at that time I found not very comprehensive was to change the mindset of African people.
Back in India now, I see how incisive her recommendation was. Without changing the mindsets of Biharis true human flourishing is impossible in Bihar.
Self-devourment occurs when the immune system starts treating human cells and organs as alien, threatening entities. Prof. Bradley has worked on this topic, resulting in a framework that helped me understand the path that Bihar has been traversing—a path of self-devouring! The poor health and civilizational uprooting of Biharis have corrupted their innate error-correction mechanisms.
What could be done to prevent such an occurrence?
The rejuvenation of Bihar is not possible without helping Biharis discover their civilizational roots and improving their health.
The development process has been problematized in Bihar by the politics of binaries along caste and religion—something that results from lazy thinking. Politics is a doubled-edge sword, it can make or break a system if it is not handled with care. And the nature of the Bihar polity has started to damage whatever potential is left in Bihar.
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Wait for the book that I am working on to furnish a framework to explain this.
Best Wishes for Bihar Day!
बिहार दिवस की ढेर सारी शुभकामनाएं!
Without getting India right, human flourishing is impossible globally, and without getting Bihar right, human flourishing in India is impossible.
[….TO BE CONTINUED]
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Disclaimer: Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation and bring people to discuss and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn. I will keep updating this article.