What a difference to this I remember was when the Heritage Hotel was built in Byculla in the early 1970s.
Dorabjees a hotelier in Poona bought a building just in front of the Gloria Church. This was adjacent to the famous Alexandra Terrace where Goan lawyers, professors, an Indian Express editor and even Ribeiro who was then a junior IPS officer lived. The newly built hotel spruced up all the nearby buildings coating them with fresh yearly paint and improving their facades. OK, this they had to do to improve the surroundings of their own structure. But what they did not have to do was prove to be a very friendly neighbor. They gave special discounts for breakfast and meals to people who lived in that part of Byculla, maintained the original accesses through the large compound that were used as shortcuts to bisecting roads and a hundred other small favors to the community at inconvenience to themselves that they didn't have to do at all. The sum total of all they did for the people in Byculla may not have cost them much, but it showed the people living nearby that the Heritage cared. Dorabjees were after all Parsis and the present buzzword of 'corporate responsibility' was something they practised before the word was coined. Surely one could have expected better from the Timblos in Goa, the land from which they derived all their wealth. Woe and a pox to these Goan robber barons who did everything for themselves and nothing for the villages in which they operated, much less for the rest of Goa. -- Roland Francis http://roland-torontogoan.blogspot.com +1 (416) 453.3371 On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Rajan P. Parrikar <[email protected]> wrote: > Read this important article in today's Herald. > http://oheraldo.in/pagedetails.asp?nid=17535&cid=14 > The hotel owners, the Goa govt and the Taleigao sarpanch > at the time (was it Somnath Zuwarkar?) were all complicit > in this scam on the people of Goa. The actors involved > deserve to be strung up a tree. > Regards, > r -- Roland Francis http://roland-torontogoan.blogspot.com +1 (416) 453.3371
