DELHI DIARY: Turbulent skies, lacking opportunities, and making news --------------------------------------------------------------------
FN THE FIRST thing that strikes you -- yet again, for the nth time -- en route to Dabolim is how poor the transport infrastructure is in Goa. This state lacks regular buses to connect to the airport, often suffers long queues for booking train tickets, and the inter-state bus reservation system isn't centralised and is, in fact, in quite a mess. There isn't even a daily train to Bangalore. Even the old inexpensive steamer service collapsed, after it was taken off route, to service the ill-advised 'peacekeeping' mission to Sri Lanka. It never got decently restored after that. Attempts to ply a hovercraft in the choppy waters between Goa and Mumbai (Bombay) didn't quite work. So much for a touristic state... and one which has a large expat population. On the 0725 Indian-Airlines flight to Mumbai and Delhi, the number of Goan faces seems few and far between. For someone seized with a sense of political and cultural insecurity about their tiny home of 1.35 million, this could be just another indicator of an impending doomsday scenario. One where we all are victims, and need to gang up against it. But is that it? For long, we've been fighting over the cake.... and living over presumed past glory. Fact is, the cake is simply too small. Unless we work on increasing the opportunity available in Goa, we're simply avoiding the crux of the issue. Perhaps such indicators offer hints that Goa is losing out on opportunity, how our young people are not getting the professional and business avenues that could make a difference, and how we've all got to be simply working harder. Our Goan we-are-better-than-the-rest sense of arrogance also probably makes us unable to compete, specially in a situation where those in the big cities have a head-start. (Later in the day, one was to see a TV program talking about the mayor of Calcutta, sorry Kolkata. He kicked off a row by blaming North Indians for making the city a mess... a la Bal Thackeray of Mumbai. So, if we are all pointing fingers to each other, who's really to blame?) Choppy skies ------------ It was an uneventful take-off from Dabolim. Thanks to the Navy's stranglehold on the airport, flights mostly land at unearthly hours in the early morning, or are bunched-up badly in the afternoon. A new airport, while making good sense to politicians and contractors, might not really be the solution.... It was a Monday, and the skies seemed turbulent. Some passengers, like this diarist, went through an article on that paradise called the Konkan (including Goa) in the in-flight magazine. It also gave a plug for the Konkan Railway Corporation. We had little of a clue that a few kilometres below, on terra firma, the rail tragedy near the Vaibhavwadi tunnel had taken place the previous night. Toll: 51. It drizzled ----------- Delhi, announced the pilot, was 30 degrees on that day. A pleasant surprise indeed, specially since the heat wave earlier had taken temperatures to the scary forties. It was drizzling in part of the city. But these were only the pre-monsoons; not the monsoons which had drenched Goa and the Konkan, falling all in one stretch, and a lot of it flooding the fields, sparking off landslides, and then promptly rushing off into the Arabian Sea unharvested. In the news ----------- Goa stays in the news in Delhi in strange ways. After all, a Delhi-centric view of the rest of India only appreciates that a place exists when there is some unusual story there (a mid-air plane collision, the country's much-hyped first SARS case, or even agovernment's collapse). There was an old Bollywood film replayed on one of the hundred or so boringly similar TV channels, focusing the hackneyed story -- the good-hearted Goan drunk. On a more positive note, former TV news-reader Usha Albuquerque's column in the Hindustan Times gave career tips to Delhi students who had just got their results. Perhaps skills of such persons need to be tapped. (For those who came in early, and know some of the pioneers of the Net in Goa, Usha is the sister of Joseph 'Boogie' Viegas, now re-settled in Canada but still very much keeping in touch with Goa through his boogie at vsnl.com address!) With the Konkan Railway accident in the news, and the bodies of the victims being shifted to the Goa Medical College, the TV news focussed on the two-year-old girl survivor who couldn't be identified. Prone to misunderstandings and simplications, the TV news repeated that KRC was a technological marvel and had a good safety record. Is that so? Otherwise, as they say, there wasn't much to write home about. (ENDS) -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha (FN) | http://www.fredericknoronha.net Freelance Journalist | http://www.bytesforall.org http://goalinks.pitas.com | http://joingoanet.shorturl.com http://linuxinindia.pitas.com | http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks ------------------------------------------------------------------------- T: 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 M: 0 9822 122436 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
