- On Mon, 8/22/11, Gabe Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > RESPONSE: ...... When we bow so lowly, we have lost it all and more. > Your comments/response would be appreciated, am holding my breath!
Dear Gabe I apologize for this late reply. Regarding the original subject "How many Goans in your city/country", I must confess the question does not interest me in terms of "how many". Whether there are 4,000 or 40,000 UK Goans is irrelevant. What does interest me is an uncompromising "indentity" census. How many Goans are engaged with Goa in some way to be called Goan? Here too I am more concerned with the emotional investment with Goa, not whether someone physically resides there or claims Goan ancestry (those parameters are for cats and dogs, humans are more complex). The usual census/idenity topics bore me, more so when they are considered in relation to pre-1961, post-1961, Catholic Goans, Hindu Goans, UK Goans, Indian Goans, etc. We Goans have an insecure habit of defining ourselves in relationship to "the other" (Indian, Portuguese, East-African, Canadian, Australian, etc.). We cannot stand alone. We are not simply afraid to stand alone but any number of invasions, migrations to the West have convinced us of being second-class, a doormat mentality and it shows up often enough. To compensate some say we are special - a fanatasy by any objective account. An honest look in the mirror shows we are at society's fringes, a failed people with few individual successes. Sure we have had CEO's of major international companies and other achievements in various fields but their success is an individual succees, not a shared Goan success. Victor Menezes is a Goan, Citibank is not Goan. Closed minds - Most Goans cannot step outside their narrow religious views and engage the entire Goan community, we still have fractured, communal divides which for one reason or another continue to plague us. But that is not enough, we cannot think big, think of the larger community, participate in worthy endeavours and fight the fight the good fight. In effect, we have reduced ourselves (and no one else to blame) to a parochial, miserable people. Bare intellects - To look at Goan society is to encounter failure. What grand ideas, statespersons have we produced lately? Instead, a patriarchal society (e.g. 39 of 40 Goans MLAs are men) reflect the smallest we have to offer. We are bottom-feeding on the political front and on most fronts. We encourage a dependency state in Goa (every solution is in terms of what the government will do for us), and in the process we have done nothing. With corruption in every pore, we are actually evolving in reverse. But we frequently sing, dance, and picnic, something chimpanzees can do with a little training. Empty souls - But our biggest tragedy is we are adrift to nowhere, weighed down by petty, mean-spirits (how many magnanimous Goans have you met?). To say we are self-centered and a selfish lot is merely to avoid saying much worse. The mirror does not lie. Where is our humanity? - today 14,000 humans died of malnutrition. Any number suffer illiteracy and poverty. But our chimpanzees sang, danced and picnicked. Oh, and they also got on their high-horse and picked a new fight with their neighbor and sabotaged progress across the other fence while not lifting a finger to help a world in desperate need. And what about our children? A confused lot in a challenging world. The best we can say about Goans if took a census is that unlike the Emperor with no clothes, we have our underwear on, but that is only out of modesty. It is not saying much about Goans but why not tell the truth. I know some will protest the above - notice they don't even have their underwear on. I could continue, but you get the idea. George
