Dear ASI Goa, This is an open letter to your order/request to register all our antiques in private homes/collections/museums in Goa with your esteemed office. In two weeks as of Friday 13th September 2019. Two weeks? Our homes Sir/Madam are over two hundred years old and you expect us to register the entire house objects in two weeks? Do you expect us Goans to employ staff to count everything in our homes? Our great grand mother’s earrings, our great great grandfather’s toilet seat, the floor tiles 400 years old, the laterite kitchen sink, the tiles on our roofs? Yes. These are the less precious objects. What you want are antiques that can be sold, traded and valued right? If so why only private homes? What about public places? In all Government offices we see antiques. Chandeliers in the Anil Shah Palace heisted by Smart City don’t feature in this list? Why don’t you ask them all to register their antiques. For centuries (yes you read that right) the Cabo/Raj Bhavan has been looted by successive Governors of it’s antique furniture, porcelain and silver. Are Government offices above this law? Talking about law, is this a law or is this a request? What if we don’t want to declare our so called daily objects that you classify as antiques? How can private homes like the Menezes Braganza in Chandor or the Figuereido House in Loutolim register their entire homes in two weeks? Are you going to depute them staff to do the count of the objects? It will take months. Are you going to go to every church, temple, place of worship to do a registry of their antiques? Where do we start? Old Goa itself will take almost a year or mor to count it’s treasures... from books to candelabras, vestments to minuscule statues. Are you going to go into bank vaults to check our jewellery? Old Goan Hindu and Catholic gold that has been with families for generations? What about clothes? Saris gifted through families? The porcelain we eat from daily without looking at their over hundred year vintage? They are antiques according to you. The same goes for the chairs we sit on and the beds we sleep in, the home deities we worship and the walls that boundary our homes. They are all antiques. So please Sir/Madam, get this hare brained idea out of your head. Go and do your real work to protect our Goan heritage. Go to the fields and hills with treasures. Identify trees over hundred years old and protect them. Get the dovorems (go look up what those are) laterite platforms, the monoliths, the abandoned forts and garbage strewn tirths, the old wells used as dumps, the hero stones and sacred stones unprotected in forests. Get them registered and accounted for. Goa is an open museum for the taking and looting. Get there first before private homes. As for museums, have a proper Goa Museum or take over the Old Secretariat and place the precious objects for public viewing. Don’t build another ‘sinking’ museum that will be demolished in ten years. In the process more treasures will be lost. We Goans are not stupid. We all know how the coin collection was looted during the transfer from the Menezes Braganza Hall in Panjim to the new ex Goa State Museum. Did you keep a count of that loot that included rare Impressionist paintings? No. Sorry Sir, those who have a museum or want to protect their erasures may register with you. We want to. Will you provide us armed guards, CCTV and Alarm systems please? If so we will register our antiques with you. But two weeks? You mean two weeks from now in 2020 I remain humbly and proudly Goan, Wendell Rodricks
Sent from my iPad Pro www.wendellrodricks.com Address: Wendell Rodricks, Campal, Panjim, Goa. 403001. INDIA Off: +91-832-2420604 Shop:+91-832-2238177 E-retail: wendellrodricks.com
