======================================================================== Goa's phone numbers change from Nov 10, 2002. Prefix old number with a 2. New numbers will be seven-digit 2XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is the old number). ========================================================================
A doctor lives on... in her writing to get published as a book shortly By Frederick Noronha PANJIM, Nov 12: She was known as a doctor, the wife of a soft-spoken businessman and the daughter-in-law of one of Goa's most popular radio announcers of yesteryears. But few new Tithi Tavora as a poet and writer in the making. Four years after the Panjim-based mother died in a gruesome murder, her book titled 'A Rainbow and A Star' is due to be published later this month. "She was a doctor -- that was well established. That she was a writer was little known," said Prava Rai, the Chorao-based ex-Delhi editor who gave final touches to this 99-page book artistically produced by the Kolkata-based Writer's Workshop. This book is to be released on November 23 at the Dona Paula-based International Centre. Well-known writer and Commonwealth prize-winner Githa Hariharan is scheduled to release the book in Goa. Tithi Bhattacharjee, as she was born in 1960 in Pune to Bengali parents, was murdered in September 1998 "in her home by people she had cared for as a doctor", as this book mentions. This was a crime that shocked Panjim. But there was another side to Tithi which lives on. "Unknown to most people around her, she continued to write poems and stories for children and for adults. She had always felt the need to express her feelings and thoughts about life and events around her, truthfully and fearlessly," says editor Rai. 'Dona Maria' is the story of an encounter with an aging aunt, one which keeps getting repeated across migration-oriented Goa. "I don't forget!," it begins with the lady protesting, "I just can't remember". Such stories come up repeatedly in home after home in a state where the young have migrated far and wide over generations. Apart from a couple of short stories, the book is made up of dozens of poems. The Mixed-Up Farm is one that catches the child's imagination: "My Uncle has a funny farm/ As strange as can be/ Where fish do walk/ And birds do swim/ And milk grows on trees." Other verse from Tithi's pen deals with the need to maintain the charms of Panjim town, the East-West clash of interpretations, dinner-table politics, and even one about the daily struggle behind bringing out a newspaper (which finally gets reduced to a wrapper for two dry chappatis of a weary farmer). Some of her verse is short, but make a a sharp and bitting point. One poem, for instance, is titled National Flag and just says this: "Saffron for Ram/ Muslims love green/ White for the rest of us/ Spinning in between." Famine Miss India 1947-97 (pun intended) points to the couldn't-care-less attitude of most of us in middle-class India for hundreds of millions of the poor, "her gaunt frame/ puts Twiggy's to shame/ her secret is not anorexia /nor bulimia, but the old Indian mantra/ 'Starvation'." "For Tithi, pain, suffering, old age and loneliness were not just day to day indignities to tackle; she felt deeply enough about these human vulnerabilities to express her bewilderment and distress in writing," adds Rai. After her medical studies, Tithi had worked at the Marie Stopes' Clinic in New Delhi, and after the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, she volunteered to join a medical team to treat the wounded in camps set up across the Jamuna in Delhi. In Goa, after her marriage in 1987 to Carlos Tavora (who runs the popular Udupi-style Navtara Hotel and other businesses and who's mother Imelda was a prominent name on the airwaves of Panjim in past decades), she was a consultant to the INS Mandovi Naval Base. Tithi also worked at the Cancer Society's Hospital and also visited the Peace Haven centre for mentally challenged in Caranzalem. She had an early love for writing. She had even written a poem and sent it to Neil Armstrong, the man who landed on the moon, as a child of eight. Hand-bound by Writer's Workshop at Kolkata, with lettering in the artistic pen of professor P Lal himself, this book comes from a tiny publishing house that has helped launch many prominent writers from the Goan world too -- including Africa/US-based Peter Nazareth, Leslie de Noronha, and others. It is priced at Rs 200 in hard-back and Rs 100 in the flexiback edition. ENDS ---------------------------------------------------------- What's On In Goa (WOIG): Nov 06 Children's book exhibn opens, Walkabout, Anjuna... (all weekdays) Nov 06 ArtHouse, Calangute: Chaitali's acrylics on canvas till 19.11 Nov 07 Revision of electoral rolls (till Nov 30) See schedule. Nov 07 Creative science, for children, Goa Sc Centre (till 16.11) Nov 10 Corporate summit on IT and biotechnology, Intl Centre (till 11.11) Nov 17 Goan Engineers and Assoc meet, at Pickering, Canada. Nov 20 Fr Agnelo's 75th death anniversary, Pilar Dec 01 Two day conference, Goa Agenda. IT For Society. (Ends 2.12) Every Sunday: Music therapy sessions at Moira, 5 pm. 278, N.Portugal ----------------------------------------------------------
