**************************************** For more information/links, see http://goanet.netfirms.com ****************************************
On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Nagesh Bhatcar wrote: > The first person of Goan origin to play Test cricket was perhaps Wally > Mathias and > he played for Pakistan. The next one was Dilip Sardessai and he played for > India! > I know for sure that Dilip Sardessai was born in GOA, and he was my Uncle's > friend and classmate in Goa. He could speak fluent Konkani and I thinks is > now > back in Goa, after having played for India, Bombay and the ACC team. > > I have no idea about Wally Mathias' place of birth. > > Nagesh Bhatcar > [EMAIL PROTECTED] Spot on! There's one thing I would like to add however. For an emigration-oriented and in-migration prone state, which has been migrating out of its own tiny state for generations, drawing a dividing line between those born in our outside Goa is going to disadvantage maybe one-third to one-half of the population. Or more. (Personally, I don't believe one needs to discriminate on grounds of ethnicity either. There are people who work is beneficial to Goa and Goans, and there are those who have a strong negative impact influence on the place and her people. That's the basic divide. Regardless of ethnicity or place of birth or language spoken.) On another front, as long as Konkani remains a hard-to-study langauge (both outside Goa and *in* Goa too), it is perhaps misleading only to blame those who don't know the language. So many Goans and visitors or settlers here wish to learn the language, but simply don't find the right institutions and/or tools. Contrary to the widely held perception that Goans are "ashamed" to speak Konkani, my guess is that for most expats are simply unable to articulatedly carry on a conversation for any length of time on a subject of significance in this tongue. The exclusivist approach visible in some Konkani circles (affecting 'non-standard' dialects or scripts) has not helped the situation. Going by the criteria above, how would you classify Dilip Sardessai's son, the well-known TV journalist Rajdeep Sardessai, on the basis of birth and fluency in Konkani? What happens two or three generations down the line? Goans have been faulted on this score for quite some time. But this is a trend that affects most communities into migration. My Malyalee friend had some language primers in his hotel room when I dropped in. "Are these your childrens'?" I asked. "No," he laughed, embarassed. "They're mine. When I retire and get back to Kerala, I need to understand the script." Apparently, he had learnt the spoken language but not the written word, during his years in Bombay/Mumbai. This is increasingly affecting other expat communities. Agreed, we Goans (perhaps since we come from a smaller language group) have been quicker to side up with the ruler, pretend we have nothing to do with South Asia, or otherwise try to shun an Indian identity. (If we were living in another point in history, and South Asia was an emporium of global wealth as it once was, would our attitude have been the same?) Language. Scope for some more emotionalised debate! Just some food for thought (as our school principal used to once say). Or grist for the Goanet mill to spur on some more (hopefully not angry) debate. FN _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.goanet.org/mailman/listinfo/goanet
