GOAN BUSINESSMEN-3 By Valmiki Faleiro Luis Guilherme Dias had a vice grip over the imports of choice European wines and spirits. He was a business genius, who well understood that when one is in business, one is in for a killing, not in charity. Before I proceed, a personal note to friends who are descendants of Guilherme: I do NOT subscribe to the view of the celebrated writer, Edward Said, who said that nothing was ever worth writing if it did not upset somebody! Guilherme had acumen for maximizing trade profits. To him should go the credit of pioneering the concept of shortages, and resultantly, reaping huge harvests of wealth. Mercantile boats, those days, took months to journey from Europe to Goa. Sailing was perilous during the monsoons. Guilherme would order massive stocks in fair season, fill his warehouses to the brim, and then cable overseas suppliers to stop further supplies. He imported – and held exclusive distribution rights of – wines from House of Vinicola, of Porto, Portugal, and whiskies and spirits from England and the Continent. With his warehouses hoarded, but local liquor stores empty, he would ration out small parcels into the market – at a premium, of course. So wealthy was the man that he was the first private citizen in Goa to possess a motorcar, circa 1903 – only after the Portuguese civil and military dignitaries. Badem (Salvador do Mundo) -born Guilherme lived in a palatial house at Panjim’s Rua de Ourem. He was also the first Goan to have state-of-the-art plumbing and sanitation. Guilherme did not earn on liquor alone. He was resourceful, reflecting in part another great Goan, Bernardo Francisco da Costa (born Margao, 1821) who, incidentally, was married to a Luisa Amelia Mazzoni, of the famous Luso-Italian wine family, from whom Guilherme would later import the locally much-loved sweetened wine, ‘Porto.’ (Bernado had started his own printing press, launched the very first independent newspaper anywhere in overseas Portugal, started the ‘Montepio Geral de Goa’ and the ‘Caixa Economica de Goa,’ established mechanized sugarcane and oil crushing mills, continuous distillation, brought to Goa the Dumbase & Perpignon plough, and founded a canning factory, Costa & Co., elder to Goa’s own ‘Vinicola.’) Or reminiscent of the latter day entrepreneurial spirit of Ratnakar Rau, a Mangalorean, who started diverse businesses in Goa in the second quarter of the last century. Guilherme ventured into innovative farming – rice and sugarcane in Bardez and Tiswadi, cotton in Kalay – with semi-mechanized methods. He recorded better yields of paddy, at 50 ‘Kumbs’ in Bardez. It was natural he stepped into agro-processing, with a rice mill at Neura and a steam-powered sugarcane crusher at Saligao. He started saltpans in Salvador do Mundo. A restless entrepreneur, he went into mineral exploration and mined manganese ore. Guilherme also got into civil construction. At close of World War-I in 1918, the colonial govt. appointed a Commission under Eng. Luis Maravilhas to modernize Vasco. He was invited to build a hotel there. He also ran an inherited private bank, a family tradition. Guilherme was founder-President of ‘Associação Commercial da India Portuguesa,’ forerunner of Goa Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He threw grand banquets, attended by the high and mighty of Portuguese Goa. At one such banquet, so goes oral tradition, the Archbishop began reciting grace at Guilherme’s lavishly laid dinner table, when a resplendent arm in shiny white gloves suddenly descended and glided over the table, sweeping off all the dishes to the floor. There is another less charitable, and unprintable, version of that story, which says the dishes didn’t fall, but morphed into something else, despite Guilherme’s state-of-the-art, in-house sanitation system. Guilherme was evidently a charitable man. Before he died on May 14, 1922 at his ancestral home at Badem, not in his palatial mansion in Panjim, he distributed his huge wealth – almost entire villages, in some cases – amongst his several daughters. The sons-in-law, yesterday’s commoners, turned today’s millionaires. His mansion, though, was gifted by his heirs to the Presentation nuns, who run Panjim’s Mary Immaculate Convent School – where the great man’s mansion once proudly stood. PS: Little Ivana Furtado of Kalapur-St.Cruz did the country proud yet again ... the country that another child prodigy, the great Dr. Francisco Luis Gomes, told the French litterateur Lamartine and the world – and reminded us – had invented chess, the game that Ivana excels, and now joins only two others on the planet with multiple titles in the under-8 world chess category. To the extent my physical spine will allow, I take a bow! (ENDS) The Valmiki Faleiro weekly column at: http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=330 ====================================================================== The above article appeared in the December 9, 2007 edition of the Herald, Goa
