Long before there was a panchayat in the village of
Saligao, and therefore long before there was a
sarpanch, long before a village had risen on that
site or even the first house had been built, a merry
little spring burbled out of the ground in what we
now call Salmona. The spring is in fact as old as the
ancient hills, whose underground waters it releases
into the sunshine; it is Mother Nature's gift to
Goa, less spectacular than Dudhsagar and Aravalem,
but to Saligao's seven thousand villagers it is
ecologically just as significant. When in 1930 I was a child growing up in Saligao,
these were the pleasures of being five years old:
one could play marbles in the street without fear
of traffic; if a car should come rattling along,
one could race it for fifty yards before it passed
you; you could play cricket using a 'piddo' for a
bat, and a ball made out an old sock; and one could
trot behind a bunch of older boys to the Salmona
spring. It was at this spring that my fourteen-year-old
brother Oscar and his friends grabbed hold of banyan
tree roots and swung across impossibly wide chasms,
pretending to be Tarzan; it was at this spring that I
plucked up my couraged, waded out into a shallow
pool, and caught my first dragonfly. I left Goa in 1939 as a fourteen-year-old myself, and
when I finally returned in 1988 for an extended stay,
one of the first things I asked my driver in Porvorim
to do was take me to the Salmona spring. It was not
quite as I remembered it; there seemed to be a hosue or
two much closer to the water; and the spring was no
longer pristine, but had been built up; the water now
poured out of a spout, and there were people washing
clothes lower down, sharing the stream with a placid
calf...May I request request VRR to kindly share with Saligaonet the text of his article? Victor, if you could send the article to us, please forward it via me and I'll circulate it to our village network. Many thanks! FN
_____ _/ ____\____ Frederick Noronha (FN) * Freelance Journalist \ __\/ \ Goa India T +91.832.2409490 M +919822 122436 | | | | \ http://fn.swiki.net http://goabooks.swiki.net |__| |___| / http://www.bytesforall.net http://www.goanet.org \/ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--W-E-B--S-I-T-E--=-=-=-=-=-= To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from Saligaonet | http://www.goacom.com/saligao_tinto/ ============================================================================ * Send e=mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (NOT [email protected]) * Leave SUBJECT blank <--- Commom Mistake !! * On first line of the BODY of your message, type: subscribe saligaonet YOUR.EMAIL OR unsubscribe saligaonet YOUR.EMAIL Questions/Problems? Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
