Has Bihar done a vanishing act?

There is simply not enough news to stand up to the Lalu days of yore when any lull in news would be delightfully filled in by the first familys antics, and there are enough of them to fill respectable hours of newsreel.
My family moved to Patna when I was little, apparently after my mother wished a misplaced desire to VISIT a city that has such a beautiful and clean airport (this is the early eighties) on a return journey from Gawhati. Obviously the God above was listening and to my mothers horror, my father had to move to Patna for work.
Lalu Yadav had just won the first of his many Chief Ministerial tenures and a ‘hawa’ of change was flowing in the state. We lived in a neighborhood of bumihars and understandably there was great brouhaha about the rise of the lowly Yadavs.
The one thing that I clearly remember as part of this change was that the local dudhwala stopped bringing his cows right upto the colony for milking sessions and now all had to visit his dairy to pick up the daily litre or two. What scandal! What fun for us kids to watch the elders foam at the mouth over it all!
The eleventh child of Lalu Yadav made good news and there were plenty of jokes to enjoy on the issue of the Bihari cricket team.
We studied in the best missionary school in town and had to frequently trudge in knee deep rain water just to reach the school gates during the monsoon. You could be hours late and simply show your squelching shoes and soggy skirt as an excuse.
If we forgot to do our home work, all we had to do was look innocently at the teacher with watery eyes and recount the harrowing tale of ‘no bijli’ all night. We pulled many an all nighter (many times a week too) when there would be no electricity and there would be no line man to be found in the whole city who would agree to fix the cut/sagging lines to this or that electricity pole. It did not matter who you were or how much you were willing to pay as bribe, if your local line man is not happy, forget the electricity for a few days.
Even when there would be electricity, either the wattage would be so low or there would be only one phase, that tubelights were a joke! High wattage bulbs sold like cakes on Christmas and you had to keep a large supply because the electricity surges would make them pop like crackers.
There were no roads because contractors would simply spread large pieces of bricks (and no mud layer on top) and simply wait for the traffic to pound it down…lo and behold there is the newly made road!
Heaven help if there was durga puja, sarswati puja or any other assorted pujas because the city would simply shut down and you could do nothing but wear your Sunday best and go mingle in the surging crowds at the various pandals.
Summer holidays were always to be spent at our grandparents place on the other end of the country and the long journey to the destination would be tiring but a happy one. The return journey always was full of strange events and you could SMELL the station LONG before it actually came, AC couch notwithstanding.
Noone had heard of reservations and people would DEMAND that they be allowed to share your berth with you. There would be so many passengers sleeping on the floor that you could simply forget the idea of a late night visit to the loo. Once my mother threw out (the train) a box of our own possessions because the person sleeping between our berths was heard rummaging through it deep in the night and when discovered ran away to the horror of all passengers who thought he had planted a bomb (this was during the events terrorising PUNJAB)!
But the Patna of my childhood would always be filled with memories of being the gang leader of the gaggle of neighbourhood kids. Nothing scared us and we would go around the place terrorizing all and sundry on holis and diwalis.
Things may have changed now and then they may never, its hard to take out the spirit of the place no matter how much the white wash.
The last few years of the last century have been more eventful than ever before especially because we would see the news coverage from afar and things always sound worse than they are on the ground. But lately there is not a peep from the state!
No stories of excesses, no examples of the most corrupt and backward state. Unless it is for another railway line in the village of some distant relative of the Railway minister, nothing makes the news channels or even the back pages of the fattest news paper.
Has Bihar gone out of fashion? Or has Bihar bashing lost its pleasure. Surely things cannot have changed so radically that the media cannot find some juicy piece of tidbit.