Amitava Kumar, 50, believes that his home town of Patna actually has three avatars - the elsewhere city that lives in the imagination of those who, like him, left it behind;the nowhere city, filthy and frantic, that is inhabited by those who cannot leave it;and the city of hope for those who come from poor districts. He attempts to capture the essence of the city in a short biography, quite unattractively titled 'A Matter of Rats'. But Kumar, who teaches English at Vassar College in the US, says he wanted to write not about rulers but about rats, both the four-legged as well as the two-legged variety.
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From Megasthenes' eulogies to its magnificence to Shiva Naipaul's description of it as the 'heart of darkness', how difficult was it to chronicle the history of Patna's fall?
We learn history and everything else through textbooks. The approach is serious and dull. It lacks imagination.
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