The injection scare was a hoax. When I spoke to my mother last week, she was effusive with details about the woman. Her descriptions were so vivid and detailed that one would have thought that my mother herself had seen this women furtively skulking around schools with syringe in hand. My mother having spawned three children of her own and as the progenitor of two grand-children is susceptible to stories about children.
The rumours were so plausible, that unsuspecting women in various parts of the state, including Vasco were randomly assaulted by self-appointed vigilantes. And there were plenty of rumours to go around. The woman was a Lamani, the woman had a male accomplice, there was a gang of women, former prostitutes from Baina, acting out in retributive vengeance. Earlier this year, similar rumours saw sightings of men with Kanjars moving from neighbouring states into Goa. A rumour in large part that fueled the Sanvordem riots. The fact that no one had actually seen either these men or their kanjars was a minor detail. The Goan Bogie Man was out of our collective closets. Mass fear isn't something new. In 1692, nineteen men and women were hanged at the appropriately named Gallows hill near Salem. They were, ofcourse, accused of witchcraft in what became known as the infamous Salem witchcraft trials. A curious fact about the collective hysteria that enveloped Salem that summer of 1692, was that it was a group of children that fabricated the story about being afflicted by the devil. Children, are intuitively aware of adult fears and are accomplished at preying on them. The good American President Roosevelt had said "there is nothing to fear but fear itself". But there is something we fear even more, change. Are we Goans, so powerless in the face of change, that we cannot cope without giving into prejudiced hysteria? Are we so small and anchorless that we have to resort to vigilantism? The Bogie man masquerading as the vox populi is doing brisk business selling canards and fear in the same breath. It behooves us Goans to take a quiet step back and chase the Bogie man of our collective psyche back into the closet. We are not helpless, we are not powerless, we are not anarchists, we are not vigilantes, we are not devoid of sympathy and compassion. We are a society governed by rules and regulation. We are Goans and we are better than this. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org