The Accidental Activist - Where have all the youngsters gone? By Venita Coelho
You never see them at any rallies. They don't come forward to volunteer for anything. Not one bothered to even attend a single of the seven awareness meetings held in my village. Where have they gone? My first puzzling encounter with the youth of Goa came when I had just joined the GBA. We needed volunteers to go and photograph all the areas that were marked on the maps as SEZ zones. Fr. Maverick sent us two young boys and I handed them a camera and explained what they needed to do. 'But if someone sees us?' asked one of them 'if they object?' I was stumped. This was crucial work. GBA members had been doing it against all odds, no one had asked questions before. The two told me they'd be back the next day. Instead I got a call saying that they wouldn't be coming. This was dangerous work and they didn't want to get into trouble. Another set of youngsters who volunteered with the Moira Action Committee vanished the minute I was arrested. 'Our parents don't want us to be in trouble' they said. I came out of a student life in Calcutta, where the youngsters were in the forefront of any agitation. They came out in the thousands onto the roads and were the lifeblood of movements. In Goa students are conspicuous by their wholesale absence in activism of any sort. Last week Claude Alvares bemoaned the fact that no youth had turned up for mining agitations. The fact is that they turn up for nothing. Puzzled, I began asking questions. Is it just the way Goan youth are? Unaware and unpoliticised? Too scared to put themselves on the line? Held back by their parents? Several fellow activists strongly spurned this suggestion. Pravin told me of how they had held up to Lathi charges when he was a student. Amol told me of the time they spent in jail. All of them broke, unable to make bail, with no one daring to tell their parents where they were, they had often spent the night. The policemen had bought them dinner. 'Today we tell students we are there with bail money. We will make sure you spend no more than an hour in jail - but no one is willing to fight for anything.' My lawyer told me of how she and her colleagues had been picked up by the cops on the day a friend was being married. She recounted the sheer agony of breaking the news of where she was to her parents who were good middle class folk with no idea of what their fiery daughter was up to. They went straight from jail to the wedding. 'We believed in our fight and nothing stopped us, not even our parents.' I have rarely seen Dean D'Cruz disheartened. But on the day our only two young volunteers vanished he asked 'Don't they care? This is their home. Don't they care what happens to it?' Another volunteer replied cynically 'On no. They want a job in the gulf. They want a girl on their arm. They want a bike under their butts. That's all they care for.' Another had an even more interesting theory, one that I am leaning towards. 'Our politicians have ruined our youth. They have corrupted them. It didn't take much - just one free and a cycle was all it took .' The truth is that the only time the students came out onto the roads to agitate was when their much promised computers didn't arrive. It is a fact that is deeply distressing. Parents need to do some soul searching about what values they are bringing their children up with. Is love for the land they live in entirely missing? Is it all about security and a job? If that is what we have taught our youngsters to prize above all then this state is doomed. Over the last two years, activism in Goa has become a groundswell. But it still needs to find the tipping point, the critical mass that will force politicians to do more than hand out sops. Without the youth that is impossible. Without the fire and the passion and the sheer numbers of college youngsters, the activist movement rattles on the best it can. The movement is to preserve the future of Goa. To save our fields, our forests, our greenery, our water, our land. I used to urge people to participate saying 'Don't you want to save Goa for the next generation? For your children? It is theirs.' I have no idea what to say to the next generation. So I will end with this story. I remember sitting in the college canteen in Calcutta and listening to a wild haired student explain exactly how to make a Molotov cocktail. 'But isn't all this dangerous?' The student looked at me with blazing eyes 'I am in the right. This is my land. I will do anything for it.' (ENDS) ============================================================================== The above article appeared in the February 24, 2009 edition of the Herald, Goa
