I would submit that the "elegant Goan era" is, at best, a myth of our collective (or individual) imagination. It is as "real" as the Golden Age that we love to hark back to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age] or a kind of cycle of yugas [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#Hindu] which lives on in our beliefs.
Such concepts are linked to class and bias, and obviously have a lot to do with our own perception of *our* place in a society. As long as we think things were fine (for us), then it was a great place. I'm sure those who feel empowered by the post-1961 social change (and I don't mean just a handful of politicians) would see things are diametrically different. Was feudal (or semi-feudal) Goa a far more comforting place for many of us then? Episodic evidence (experiences with the GMC, for instance) are hardly what we can base our arguments on. For instance, I almost died of diphtheria in the Goa Medical College (shortly after its Escola Medica) days in the mid-1960s. My kid had his tongue neatly healed with minimum fuss earlier this decade. So did my daughter when it came to dealing with a foot accident. But are we comparing apples and oranges? Or just trying to make our own (biased) political point? FN -- FN +91-832-2409490 or +91-9822122436 [email protected] Books from Goa,1556 http://scr.bi/Goa1556Books Audio recordings (mostly from Goa): http://bit.ly/GoaRecordings On 12 November 2012 07:17, Roland Francis <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't know when the gentler, elegant Goan era commenced, but I do know > the > end started in the mid eighties. > As to what this era was, the explanation would take more than a post, but > perhaps you could get the drift from an example in Pinheiro's recent post > of > his father being treated in the GMC of 1982 and his sister in the same > hospital but in 2002. >
