These kind of books are useless stories which does not make any news for the Goan of today. Goans today are interested to get out of Goa with their right citizenship ie: Portuguese. Kanekar and company should try to stop the bharati blockade. One wonders if Goa is becoming an other Cuba? BC FREEDOM-FIGHTERS, ACADEMICS AND GOA?S DECOLONIZATION By DALE LUIS MENEZES
If 15 August, 1947 is considered as a momentous day in the history of the Indian nation, 19 December, 1961 can be considered to be the Goan equivalent of the ?Indian Independence? whereby it is largely agreed upon that ?Liberation? from Portuguese colonial rule was achieved after 450 years. The corpus of perceptions handed down to us regarding Operation Vijay launched by the Indian State is often viewed through a (almost sacral) veneer of nationalist history, wherein vivid images of Goan freedom-fighters being brutally assaulted and tortured by the Portuguese police and military shape and define this discourse through art, literature, poetry and songs. But one cannot deny the fact that this particular slice of history and the role of freedom-fighters in it have not been critically assessed. Happily for us, due to a wonderful memoir by Suresh Kanekar, we can shift our thinking in this direction. Suresh Kanekar is the father of the best-selling novelist Amita Kanekar, though Suresh Kanekar is a well-known academic himself, having few books and numerous research papers to his credit. He has also previously authored a novel called Of Mangoes and Monsoons.
