Dear goanet readers Santosh Helekar is the person who deserves high praise, if he says Selma's book is "well-researched and well written", one has to presume that he has read it from cover to cover including all research documents, if I may be so bold to ask him did he attend speed reading classes? Please could he kindly share with us his secret of success?
Most of us only received The Book at the event that Launched 100 copies just over a week ago. So far I have enjoyed stories of a merry band of Goykars, equivalent to the Oom-Pah-Pah band, who played in Zanzibar and Casablanca style bars (Casablanca as in film not place, where one saw a bar filled with smoke wafting to the ceiling and had that classic line "here's looking at you, kid"). Just got to the exciting part where one of our fellow Goykar's took out his gun and shot a charging lioness only to become distracted by postings from fellow Goykars on goanet doing just that, taking out blazing guns, this time to save a lioness. There is no point in me asking for advice on "speed reading" from Melvyn, he's just got one line in his head "Goans don't tell the right story". Have now come up with a novel way to gain more reading time - "ting" meals (Ting is short for microwave). Managed to bag the last one from Marks and Spencer supermarket under their Modern Indian Range NEW (in bold) "Goan Chicken". Melvyn's eyes lit up, he thought I cooked him "Chicken Cafreal", the instructions on the packet say microwave for 2 minutes not "tell your husband" so I didn't. Normally at book launches there is plenty of champagne but all our Goykar men appear to have drowned down barrels of 92 per cent proof contrabrands and taken goanet to new dizzy heights. For the moment, at least until most of us have read The Book, let us celebrate and be glad and grateful that with the help of a grant my best friend, Selma bhai, through creative thinking and writing, has penned pictures of our lives in East Africa without living there. After we have read The Book those of us who have lived in East Africa may have comments to make. As has been predicated in the future our community are in danger of falling into a big drainhole and coming out the other side "beige". At least our children's children, children, children 200 years from now will know from The Book that there were once Goykars that roamed East Africa and they were originally "brown". PS: The Book = A Railway Runs Through (just like life and our Mandovi River). Rose Fernandes Thornton Heath, Surrey, United Kingdom 14 May 2014
