All India Radio has been seen as long having a bias towards playing a lot of Alfred Rose... and I'm currently tuned into a song of his of the 'seventies. He talks about taking a new year's resolution not to drink foreign liquor, or use foreign blades for shaving and even foreign clothes.
It took me back to the 'seventies, when import substitution was the mantra ... and every dollar wasted was close to a crime. Interesting how times change! By contrast, a friend was mentioning the other day about the interesting quality of inexpensively priced short-pants making it to places like the Mapusa market, from countries like Bangladesh or even the Dominican Republic! And, talking about music, yesterday I heard the song from Prince Jacob's film Padri, which talks about how unfunny it is without money in a "rich man's world". "I have pockets aplenty, and purses aplenty.... but no money at all"! Apologies to Abba ... but this actually isn't a cheap re-make of the Swedish quartet. Infact, it's a very apt reflection of Goan sentiment. Those who saw the movie (which I have mixed feelings about... it's rooted in such a Catholic worldview, that it's unlikely to cut ice with half of Goa and more!) would recall this number, and its picturisation by the Jacob-Humbert duo along the sands of Colva. Jacob's is slapstick humour, and if you don't have any hang-ups about that... it's quite enjoyable. My eight-year-old Riza enjoyed it immensely, and I don't say that as a way of snubbing Prince Jacob's form of humour. Even while laughing, it made me think of the majority of Goa (whatever their religion and geography), whose issues just don't get talked about by the media or the middle-classes and elites defining "Goan issues" today! While elitist critics accuse our (meaing Konkani) singers and writers of not having standards, I have aruged elsewhere recently [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/goawriters/message/752] that, in fact, the Konkani cultural scene reflects the hopes and aspirations of the subaltern Goan more deeply than does many other 'classical' forms of culture in other languages. Unfortunately, we need a Pramod Kale to come along and remind us of that via an eight-page article in as prestigious a journal as the Economic and Political Weekly [http://www.epw.org.in/] Of course, there's an element of (and more) of embedded chauvinism quite often here. That's another debate.... -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha http://fn.goa-india.org 9822122436 +91-832-240-9490 http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/ _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
