Dear Augusto, The point I made is loud and clear in what I wrote. That the author used personal anecdotes to good effect. Have you read the book?
I am not aware that the author (Teotonio R. de Souza) suffers from a “proclivity for toadying up to the Saraswats, the Catholic ones at any rate". There is no hint of any such proclivity in the book under review. Are you, Augusto, by any chance, the butt of that anecdote? Best, v From: augusto pinto [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 05 October, 2014 7:58 PM To: goanet; Valmiki Faleiro Subject: Subject: [Goanet] Goa Outgrowing Postcolonialism: a review Valmiki Faleiro writes: "(Teotonio De Souza) uses personal anecdotes to good effect, as at pgs.132-133: *On a personal note, if [laureate Umberto] Eco had a motive for creating his blind librarian and naming him Jorge from Burgos, I too may have one for discovering a Goan avatar of [Edgar Allan] Poe’s hero in my native village of Moira. In a bid to make a mark as fiction writer, he dabbles in the pre-historic glories of the mahars, claiming that they have fallen from grace due to victimization by Saraswats! He may run for shelter if I choose to reveal that one of my first cousins, a Saraswat, was married in Church to a woman from Moira adopted by a mahar family. He may persist in his obsession, like someone who insisted in convincing me that Jesus was a Brahmin, because his cousin, John the Baptist lived on honey and low castes (read locusts).* I don't appreciate the point that Valmiki seems to be making. Does he agree with TS that merely because his cousin marries the adopted daughter of a Mahar, TS gets absolved of his proclivity for toadying up to the Saraswats, the Catholic ones at any rate? If this is what he thinks is " the Teotonio trademark of trustworthiness" I'm not impressed. During his recent visit to Goa at a meet organized by Goa Book Club I questioned TS as to the reason for his bias and he came up with the lame excuse that there were no sources and that I should take up the job of writing the history of the Mahars. I retorted that I was a mere storyteller and not a historian, and that historians seem to choose methodologies which suit their biases. Incidentally, TS is quite the typical Moidekar Bamon ganvkar: this breed is notorious for taking potshots at people without having the courage to name names. Augusto
