PAGE 16

Tell your friends about PatnaDaily.Com

I am overwhelmed. Brilliant pictures in the photo gallery!! Please include more pictures from Patna College, my Alma Mater, which I am so proud of, despite every academic failure it has now come to symbolise. I owe a lot to Bihar so thanks a lot for providing me beautiful glimpses of my city and state as well ! All the best!

Pallavi Singh, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai

I am really delighted to see the URL named PatnaDaily.Com. This site provides very good information on Bihar along with the updated local news. (It is very important for a person who is living far from his home state because he can easily get the national news from a national daily news- paper.) Thanks to my friend Mr. Ashwini Kumar Singh who informed me about the site. If you can please, add some information from Gopalganj district as well.

Cdt. A. K. Pandey
National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla, Pune-23

Hi! A fascinating web site especially since it struck a chord of my brief childhood growing up in Patna . Another Canadian Anne Ruttan advised me of your site and I am so glad to have had this opportunity to write.

After a lapse of thirty-six years I returned to Patna in 2003 and went to see Hasan Manzil on Fraser Road , I was not able to recognize the place . I would be grateful for a photograph of a white building that stood on the corner of I think Fraser Rd and Dak Bungalow Rd. It was like a huge white palace and occupied by the Imam family who was the Chief Justice of Patna . There used to be a petrol station or an auto dealership directly opposite this house/ mansion. I happened to reside in that house and during my last visit was not able to get a photo . The house looked vacant and somewhat dilapidated nevertheless I would still love to see the place. Best Regards.

Alan Merritt, Canada

Why do I have the shivers and goose bumps - see what I told you about your web pages. It is incredible that you and your colleagues are so kind in facilitating these re-connections. Thank you so very, very much.

I wish I had been in Patna for our old school's 150th celebration but unfortunately I was not informed in time. It must have been a phenomenal reunion for ex St. Joseph's Convent students as I have heard this from a couple of other schoolgirls as well.

Let me tell you that your reports and responses to some visitors' comments are sharp as tacks and to the point. I particularly enjoyed your remarks to the comment by a visitor that you only published comments favourable to your web-site. Your language was impeccable and far exceeds in quality some of the journalism here in Canada - believe it or not!

Anne Ruttan, Canada

Hi. This I am writing after going through to your site. I saw editor's reply on Prawasi's mail, that was great. Keep it up. I saw Moinul Haq Stadium - that was a great feeling. I was trying to visualize our Basketball court. Please include the snap of Patna Women's College & also Woodland's high School. Anybody from there, please reply to my mail. I would like to know about my school & school friends. Any one from PWC's 2003 batch, please contact me on my e-mail id. Really this is a great starting.. I would like to know whose idea is this. Congrats.

Swarn Prabha, Mumbai

After a long time I visited PatnaDaily.Com. Nice to see lots of changes in this site.

I really feel great after visiting this site. Keep It Up!!!!

Alok Ranjan

I opened the Feedback section after ages - and was so tickled to find not one but two names I recognised. The first is Anne Francis, the second Noel Pires. I studied with the first and if I am not mistaken, the second had a sister called Vivian who was also in St Joseph's Convent. To these I would like to say - you missed a GREAT time in December, when SJC celebrated its sesquicentennial year and 150 old girls, some of us very old indeed, gathered for the event held over four days. Patna is Patna, sad and decrepit now, but somehow, it mattered not a whit as we got together and behaved EXACTLY as we used to nearly forty years ago. We wallowed in nostalgia, laughed, whistled, discussed our arthritic knees, went on a day trip to Gaya, and restored old links. Hopefully these will never be broken.

And thanks for the website. You must have been told this so often, but I must say it myself - YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB!

Carol Andrade, Mumbai

As you very well know, at this time you have a very loyal and large readership that is prawasi. If you look at PatnaDaily from the point of view of a prawasi Bihari, you will realize that the primary reason for their being there is nostalgia. That nostalgia should and must be fed. Right now, your photographs do a good job of that.

I would strongly encourage you to start carrying short stories - say two times a week, one that pertains to Bihar and the other more national in character. The Bihari story should portray the sights, smells and feel of urban and rural Bihar. Please edit them to include descriptive text of locales, peoples, weather etc. Please pick stories that are light and entertaining.

Rakesh Chaubey

Hi. I'm Faizan and I work in Delhi for a call center. I really was fascinated to see this site as I am from Patna. I was really happy to see it. Keep up the good work.

Syed Faizan, New Delhi

I am very very glad to see the site of PatnaDaily.Com. Actually I can't sleep without seeing this site.

I am a Bihari. Now I am in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) where 30,000 to 50,000 Biharis are living. May I do anything for PatnaDaily.Com?

A well-wisher of Bihar.

Dr. Sajid Kamal, UAE

My sister Cilla Francis alerted me to your web-site and I have found it fascinating. Clicking on the photos of the city and my old school, St. Joseph's Convent, Bankipore have brought back many memories. You not only have provided a wonderful site for information, but also inadvertently a site for contact. One of my school friends contacted me through my sister's 'feedback' and we are in touch already because you were kind enough to contact my sister for release of her e-mail address to this school buddy. Thank you indeed for that. We are now in touch by e-mail, have talked on the phone at least once already and have discovered that we have overlapped each other in Toronto, Ontario and Victoria, B.C. in Canada. We now live within a little over an hour's flying time of each other. I browse your web-site and readers' comments every two or three days to see if other familiar names appear - and they have. I am sure that wasn't the original intention of the feedback comments page but again, it is serving to provide that purpose as well... I have referred your page to other ex-schoolgirls that I am in touch with. I like reading some of the news but prefer browsing the excellent and abundant links as some of the news is sad and I have enough of that already in our newspapers.

Anne Ruttan (nee Francis), Canada

I go to your website everyday. I read the few headlines of the day and then look for readers' contributions. Unfortunately, I find that though a lot of very educated and enlightened Biharis live all over the world, they have not bothered to write much. I think that it is because a sense of community has not developed yet. PatnaDaily is an excellent forum and, in fact, a sole platform for this noble thing to take place. I have refrained from writing lately as I did not want to hog up the bandwidth and wanted others to write too. I love reading what other people have to say.

I think some positive reinforcement (encouragement) is needed to cajole people into participating in the Global Bihari community by writing more.

Rakesh Chaubey

I am writing from London to congratulate you upon a fascinating, well-written and very lively newspaper. I will be in Patna in February while travelling between Kolkata and Delhi, and therefore I have been reading your internet version regularly in recent weeks with the aim of briefing myself about local affairs. I was for eight years a reporter and columnist for the Liverpool Echo and the Financial Times, and so I look at the Patna Daily with a professional's eye. I admire particularly your forceful coverage of politics and law and order in Bihar, such as today's item on tax evasion, and the human interest in your stories.

Nick Bunker, De Beauvoir Town, London N1, England

I am still waiting for my school (Mt. Carmel, Patna) or college (Patna Women's College) friends to get in touch with me.

I would love to know where some of my friends are. Krishna Mustafi from my school and college if anyone knows where she is please contact me at neelu_c_mishra@yahoo.com.

Neelu Mishra (Chaudhary), USA

It is good news for me now I would be able to see my city from Delhi. When I was surfing this site I was feeling that I am around my own city. Thanks for the same keep it up.

Rayaz Ansari, New Delhi

I have often wondered how the old place is. I lived in No 9 Hardinge Road which was renamed Ali Imam Path and was actually present when the students were shot outside the secretariat building across the maidan from my house.

One day god willing I will return to see the old places, Gandhi Maidan, Golghur - I was at school at St. Xavier's next door to the State Bank and the Golghur. My father was secretary of state in the political department at the time and I left in 1960 a lifetime ago.

Noel Pires, UK

Editor's Note:
Mr. Pires had earlier written on Dec. 1, 2003:

"I was born in Patna and went to St. Michaels school in Kurji back in the 50's. Could you tell me if the school which was run by Irish Christian Brothers is still there and if so, do they have a web site?

I have only today seen your web site and this is the first contact I have had with Patna since I left in 1960. Brings back a lot of good memories." - Noel Pires