Just to take up issue with Dr Jose Pereira on a few points... Though I've been associated with working on his book, and greatly admire his intellect and breath of vision, I don't agree with some of the issues raised below.
On 27 July 2010 15:25, Frederick Noronha <fredericknoro...@gmail.com> wrote: > 'THE FORCES DESTROYING GOA ARE MUCH STRONGER THAN I AM' Overall, the piece raises good issues. But am I alone in recognising the old journalist strategy of picking the most attention-catching statement and placing it in the headline? If so, a pity. It creates an unduly pessimistic tone over a subject full of colour, history and delightful sound. > Q: You spent a majority of your life outside Goa. How did it > feel to be separated from your motherland? > Like a rat, I have run away from the sinking ship, which is > Goa. If you know Dr Pereira, you would also know that he has a mischevious, puckish sense of humour. I would see his above self-depreciating statement in the above context. Some (many?) Goans need more space to grow, compared to what Goa provides them. At the same time, they are strongly tugged back home, and to the memories of home, via what I call 'the Goan male homing instinct'. (It seems less strong among female Goans, but this is going by episodic evidence.) When a journalist-friend and his TV crew (I think it was the then Dilip Padgaonkar-led APCA, Asia-Pacific Communication Associates, if I recall right) visited Damodar Kossambi's traditional home at Sancoale, they asked some male relative if he would have achieved as much had he stayed at home. The relative was unequivocal: "Most definitely not." > The mando is beloved but betrayed. It was the work of the > aristocratic minority to create a fragment of Europe > surrounded by the waters of the Arabian sea and the hills of > the Sahyadris... an attempt to create a little Vienna with > a fantastic spirit and dance. The mando has gone far beyond its original roots in today's Goa. Without claiming any expert, insider knowledge, I can say I've photographed this colourful song-dance form for the better part of a decade. It has grown in recent years, it is morphing and changing. >From the time when I wrote pessimistic reports about the mando dying out, it seems to have come back with a bang, attracted far wider numbers of performers and musicians, and from far wider groups than the traditional Catholic elite which earlier patronised it. > tune. It was a fantasy world. It couldn't have lasted very > long. It lasted about a hundred and fifty years. I like the > fantasy world of the mando. Strange though it may seem, the tiatr is only around 118 years old. But it too has survived, is thriving and growing in new ways... > Q: Even today, the tiatr is a very vibrant industry, don't > you think? > Yes, that is because the Catholics are afraid that their > entity is being dissolved and this is their way of asserting > their identity. Seems like a bit of an unfair statement. Even assuming the above is right, why would the Catholics choose only the tiatr, and not something else? I would suspect that the spurt in tiatr activity has more to do with (i) the tiatr shifting its epicentre from Bombay to Goa, after the end of Portuguese rule and censorship here (ii) the fact that the tiatr echoes the heartbeats of the commonman (particularly among the Catholics) as Dr Pramod Kale pointed out in his seminal essay, and even 'editorialises' on local issues within a few weeks of an event happening, as seen in the Mickky-Ratol case -- there is a worry trend, as a friend pointed out though, with politicians using some tiatrs to push their own political goals by 'sponsoring' some directors to ensure they take a favourable line (iii) tiatr remains one of the few viable drama forms in and around the region (iv) most other media tend to take the side of the status quo, often supporting whichever party is in power, and thus leaving the commonman feeling marooned. There are probably other factors too, with experts like Tomazinho Cardozo and Dr Rafael Fernandes could elaborate on. > Q: What do you feel about the future of Konkani? > I'm no longer optimistic about the future of Konkani. It > has to fight too many forces that are too great for it to > take on. What will we do? While Dr Pereira does have a point, isn't this being too pessimistic? When things look bleak, one never knows where new support and initiatives will come from. For instance, if Konkani was made easier to learn globally, that would have been one huge step forward. > Q: If you were to get a chance to live again, what would you > like to come back as? > I suppose I could be a computer graphics expert. But then, a > meditative existence would not be possible. This is very funny! I can almost picture Dr Pereira's almost-hidden mischevious smile, as he makes an outrageous if playful comment! A computer graphics expert! > We used to read books and classics. I read all of > Shakespeare, Dickens... but today's youth know computers. We > had an opening to Portuguese culture which today's youth > don't have. The Portuguese have died out and with that the > Goa I knew has also died out. We no longer create new songs. > In our time, the songs were being composed by the dozen. Looking down with uncertainity at the youth of the time is a long-standing tradition! Our parents' generation looks at askance at us, and we look down condescendingly at our kids'. I can assure you, they're learning new things, will achieve much, but perhaps just very different things. > Q: Do you think Goa is a good place to nurture scholars of > your caliber? > We don't have the institutions. It will take time. Where can > one do meditative research? Definitely not at Goa University! True. The lack of institutions and institution-builders is scary. Even the few good ones (for eg. Dr/Fr Romauld De Souza or Principal Newman Fernandes) have been sidelined and/or seen as controversial. Goa University needs to evaluate its own role as a centre that studies the region it is based in (i.e. Goa, and beyond that, the Konkan too). Instead of getting all worked up about ethnicity of the faculty, we need to see the focus of the research and whether the region benefits from having and funding a local university. Else, it becomes very easy for politicians like Luizinho Faleiro or Manohar Parrikar to target the GU, and everyone would just stand-by, since after 25 years most people here probably have very little of a stake in the kind of knowledge the university produces. Lot more could have been done. Correct me if I'm wrong. > Q: Do you ever regret leaving your home behind? > What they cannot control, the wise do not grieve. The forces > that are destroying Goa are much stronger than I am, why > should I grieve? A bit of a trap, but at the crossroads we can make just one choice! At the end of the day, I think the kind of scholarship Jose Pereira has put out, despite [or because of?] being out of Goa is simply astounding! FN * * * UK STOCKS EXHAUSTED! After a community-supported launch at Croydon, Selma Carvalho's *Into the Diaspora Wilderness* is available at Broadways Book Centre, Panjim [Ph +91-9822488564] Price (in Goa only) Rs 295. Ask a friend to pick up a copy. Details of the book http://selmacarvalho.squarespace.com/ * * *
