Patna’s moment has arrived

Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats book is not a biography of my city, but of his, says a reviewer in The Hindu. 

Kumar emphatically writes, ‘When I first came to Delhi, I hated Patna. But I remember I also hated myself then.’ I remember when I first arrived in Delhi I used to introduce myself as hailing from Gurgaon, where my uncle lived, for fear of being stamped a Bihari. It took three years for me to make peace with my identity, four years to list Patna as my hometown on Facebook and seven years to confess about my belongingness to my city here, after a writer of Kumar’s calibre has written about it that gives me an unprecedented pride while exclaiming, ‘Haan, hum Patna ke hain.’