[Goanet] Only Give
saw owner of restaurant give yesterday’s buns to pigeons he breaks buns into small and smaller pieces thows to pigeons who eat happily i look up and read the signage Pure Vegetarian Restaurant a sigh of relief what does joao want to say?
Re: [Goanet] Origins of the colours of the Indian flag
The Indian flag designer looked at various flags for ideas and narrowed it down to the Irish flag which he printed "Landscape" instead of "Portrait". Being a govt. bureaucrat who was on his tea and lunch break for most of the day, he did not have time to realize his mistake and gave the printout to his Supervisor who was also on his tea and lunch break for most of the day. But the Supervisor did commend him and said "this is first-class" as some Indians say when they do not know any better and are too lazy to know better. The flag was approved and this is the true story. So now you know the truth. On Saturday, September 11, 2021, 03:35:37 PM PDT, Ivan Pereira wrote: FYI - sharing a ‘note’ with members of Goanet.net: Origins of the colours of the Indian flag: orange, white, & green. The other very big coincidence (as u & colleagues may know) is the similarity of the colours of the Irish flag & the Indian flag: The Irish flag has green, white, & orange vertical stripes. It is well-known that the Indian independence leaders admired the Irish freedom fighters in the 1910s, Collins & others, surviving thru the Partitions, etc.. They wondered how Ireland got independence (except for the 14 northern Protestant majority counties) while being in close proximity with England, & why India was having such difficulty 1000s of miles away. There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo taught in schools about the significance of the colours, religious symbolism, etc., & the chakra of course of Ashoka the Great. However, the coincidence & similarity to the Irish flag is unmistakable, the Indian flag having the same colours horizontally, the Irish vertically. No other flag had similar colours. The Indian independence leaders were making a strong statement that they were part of the international community, & that independence was not about isolation, or being isolated. Subsequently, more than a decade later, an African country chose the same colours. The Indian leaders behind the scenes were ‘internationalists’, & very rightly so, as they wanted to participate in the international economy, as that was where they saw their future & prosperity. Dieu Borem Korun !
[Goanet] Top ten gangsters in Goa....
How many of these have you heard of? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzJlmer2Az8 ᐧ
[Goanet] WATCH: Our mobile phones are covered in bacteria and viruses… and we never wash them
WATCH: Our mobile phones are covered in bacteria and viruses… and we never wash them https://theconversation.com/watch-our-mobile-phones-are-covered-in-bacteria-and-viruses-and-we-never-wash-them-167784 ᐧ
[Goanet] Mississauga family in alleged hate-motivated attack
Police speaking of the attack: In my grandfather’s time: We’ll beat the bas**ards black and blue so they won’t dare do it again. In my father’s time: We’ll lock them up and throw away the key. In my time: They will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. At the present time, quoting the Police Chief in the latest incident (link below): “Hateful, deliberate acts such as this will not be tolerated, and I can assure you that the appropriate resources are being allocated to identify those responsible.” In the future: Culprits’ rights must be respected. We will only arrest them if they agree to it. https://www.680news.com/2021/09/13/mississauga-hate-motivated-assault//?utm_source=nl_medium=em_campaign=680NewsPM; Roland. Toronto.
[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Hurry, lift-off's at 9. Or maybe at 9:01
Sep 13 Like many of you reading this, I'm sure, I learned about Albert Einstein's theories of relativity in college. Though actually I didn't really learn. It was only years after college, after a fair amount of reading, that I felt I got a basic, simple understanding of Einstein's ideas. And when I did, I was surprised by how almost intuitive they are. Perhaps that's the spirit that motivated my last column for Mint (Friday Sept 10): Hurry, lift-off's at 9. Or maybe at 9:01, https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/hurry-lift-off-s-at-9-or-maybe-at-901-11631210895261.html Let me know what you make of it. cheers, dilip PS: On reading the article again, I'm not convinced I got one part of it right - my explanation of what Washique experiences. (The para that begins with "Well, the hands of the clock above his head will move as he expects."). Thoughts? --- Hurry, liftoff's at 9. Or maybe 9:01 The distinctive feature of the campus of BITS Pilani, my alma mater, is a handsome clock tower with four faces. Maybe more distinctive is that the four faces show slightly different times, a source of amused pride for generations of BITSians. But seriously, the tower is an arresting sight, visible from nearly anywhere on campus, useful to couples on dates needing to get back to hostels by possible curfew times. It's also triggers a thought experiment that Albert Einstein once, well, thought through, though not in Pilani. The different times on the faces are, in a sense, fitting. Imagine a rocket that starts at the BITS clock tower at precisely 9am on January 1 2022 and flies away in a straight line. Imagine my BITS friend Parvathy sitting in that rocket, looking back at the tower - at one of its clocks, actually. What time will she see on the clock? Silly question, you think? Parvathy will see 9am as she begins her flight, then a minute later she'll see the minute hand tick over to 9:01, and another minute later it will tick over to 9:02 ... on and on like that. True, but let's add a wrinkle to this. Say the rocket flies at a high speed - at, in fact, the speed of light. (Assume that the rocket can fly that fast, and that it accelerates instantly to that speed). What then? Yes, the clock will show 9am as Parvathy sets out. But think of what happens when the minute hand shifts to 9:01 a minute later. The image of that shift will, in a sense, set out at the speed of light, trying to reach intrepid Parvathy so she will know a minute has passed on her beloved campus. But she's travelling at the speed of light too, and is a minute's travel ahead already. So the image will never catch her; instead, it will stay forever a light-minute behind. Put another way, Parvathy will never see that change to 9:01. For her, the clock tower is frozen at 9am. (One more assumption here is that there is some magical way that she can "see" the tower as she moves.) If she doesn't know about Einstein and his experiment, Parvathy will be greatly baffled by this. For if she looks at the Titan wristwatch she's wearing, she will see it ticking along just as always, showing her 9:01 and 9:02 and so on - but the clock tower is at a standstill. So: if Parvathy doesn't move from the clock tower, she will see the clock's and the Titan's hands moving just as she, and all of us, expect them to. But if she zips off at the speed of light, she'll see the Titan's hands move as usual, but the clock's hands not at all. What about at speeds somewhere between stationary and the speed of light? If you think about it, you'll realize that as she moves ever faster, time as measured by the Pilani clock seems to get steadily slower, until it stops altogether when she reaches the speed of light. Seems like the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Yet this is not quite the full story. Imagine now what my BITS friend Washique, sitting in the clock tower, makes of this situation. He looks out of one of the tower's narrow windows and watches Parvathy soar away. In particular, he's looking at that wristwatch she's got. (Yes, he can see her wristwatch in the same magical way that Parvathy sees the clock tower). What does Washique notice about the two timepieces? Well, the hands of the clock above his head will move as he expects. So when it changes to 9:01, he naturally expects that the Titan's minute hand will have shifted to show 9:01 as well. But remember that the Titan is moving away from him at the speed of light. So what happens to its image of that shift to 9:01? It starts out from Parvathy's wrist at 9:01 on both timepieces, travelling towards Washique at the speed of light. But at that instant, Parvathy is an entire light-minute, or 18,000,000 km, away - because the speed of light is 300,000km/second. So the image will take another minute to reach Washique. That is, Washique sees Parvathy's wristwatch change to 9:01 when the clock above his head shows 9:02. Similarly, he will see 9:02 on her Titan at 9:04 on the tower.
[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Olympics check: Breaking into the champions league
Sep 13 Soon after the Tokyo Olympic Games were finished, I got a query from the Hindustan Times. Would I try exploring India's performance (7 medals), they asked, in terms of all the disciplines India did not enter and thus had no chance to medal in? Something numbers-driven, perhaps? That was the broad-stroke brief, anyway. Here's what I made of it, in the paper on Sunday September 5: Olympics check: Breaking into the champions league, https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/art-culture/olympics-check-breaking-into-the-champions-league-101630749325798.html (Text below. Also attached is a PDF, with 2-3 very minor errors). Any thoughts? cheers, dilip PS: I had the title that's below, which I kind of liked. HT changed it. Still, where's my title from? PS #2: Happy birthday to the most recent addition to this mailing list! --- Half a leg, half a leg onward Seven medals. One gold, two silver, four bronze. That's India's haul from the just-concluded Tokyo Olympics. By that count, it's our best-ever Olympics, that total of seven just pipping the six medals India's athletes brought back from London in 2012. So yes, naturally there was euphoria after Tokyo - over Neeraj Chopra's gold, Mirabai Chanu's silver, the men's hockey team's bronze, PV Sindhu's bronze ... indeed, all seven medals. And yet when the dust settles, there remains a strange and familiar disquiet. I mean, you've heard, I'm sure, all the arguments - laments, more like it - about our performance at the Games over the years. In the end, it boils down to this: India has the second-largest collection of people in the world, about a sixth of humanity as a whole. We sent our biggest-ever contingent this year, 126 athletes. So why didn’t we come home with a sixth of the medals on offer in Tokyo? Instead, our seven is a tiny fraction of the over 1,000 medals that were won at the Olympics: less than 0.7%. There are other laments too. We have the resources. We produce world-class cricketers by the bushelful. Why not Olympic athletes? But of course, laments only go so far and are frustrating and unsatisfying anyway. Let's instead take a closer look at the medal counts and see if there are lessons we can learn. First, yes: there were indeed over 1000 medals on offer. 340 gold medals were awarded, so there were at least that many silver and bronze. I say "at least" because there were some events (for example, boxing) in which two athletes won bronze. Of course, there was at least one in which two athletes won gold - the men's high jump, in which Italy's Gianmarco Tamberi and Qatar's Mutaz Essa Barshim agreed to share the gold medal. Though no silver was awarded there. Still, let's use 1000 as a nice round figure of the medal count. Those 1000 were spread across a wide range of disciplines. From badminton to diving to sport climbing, rhythmic gymnastics to surfing to handball and many more, there are 40 sports listed on the Olympics website. But that's a misleading number. First, all of those have separate tracks for men and women, so it's effectively 80 separate categories we're talking about. But more than that, several of those sports have several separate events, each of which awards a medal. Take a dive into diving, for example. There's synchronised 3m springboard, synchronised 10m platform, 3m springboard and 10m platform - four different medal events. Or take a dive into swimming. I won't list the 35 different medal events, just these three examples: 50m freestyle, 200m backstroke, 4x100m medley relay. Note I haven't even mentioned artistic and marathon swimming, both listed separately from swimming itself. And take a look at athletics: 48 medal events that played out on the track and field inside that Olympic stadium. (Well, except the marathons that meandered outside the stadium.) >From the 87 events alluded to in that last paragraph, India brought home precisely one medal: Neeraj Chopra's gold in throwing the javelin. Let that sink in for a few seconds. I'm not saying India did not enter the other 86 events. We did. Take athletics: We had Kamalpreet Kaur throwing the discus, Dutee Chand in the 100m. In the javelin event, Shivpal Singh was India's other competitor, though he failed to make the final. Muhammad Anas Yahiya, Noah Nirmal Tom, Arokia Rajiv and Amoj Jacob ran a super 4x400m heat and came agonizingly close to qualifying for the final. We had a total of 25 entries - 8 women, 17 men - in the athletics events. Take swimming: India's Sajan Prakash swam in the second heat of both the 100m and 200m butterfly event. There are 8 heats, and the best 16 times qualify for the semifinal. In the 100m, Prakash knew by the fifth heat that he would not qualify: 22 swimmers were faster. In the 200m, 16 were faster by the fourth heat. Maana Patel swam in the first heat of the 100m backstroke; by the 4th she knew she would not progress. Similarly for Srihari Nataraj in the 100m backstroke. Take diving: well, India had no diving entries
[Goanet] HAS THE COVID EXPERT COMMITTEE SUCCUMBED TO THE CASINO AGENDA?
The expert committee of doctors constituted to advise the Goa Government on measures to prevent and manage the third wave effectively should be allowed to function independently by being free from political manipulation whatsoever. Would it not amount to conflict of interests that the Chief of the Goa BJP Medical cell has managed to find a place on this committee? That he lacks any expertise whatsoever is another issue. Is it not surprising that this 23 member expert committee having opined against promotion of ‘Liberal Tourism’ and opening of Casinos, soon made a glaring U turn on the issue. Was it playing to the political script of those in power while overlooking the ground reality? If so it was in contravention of its mandate and very purpose. Political and even economic agenda should never overrule sound medical and scientific reasons as it could lead to misery and suffering that everyone has to endure. Experience in other countries clearly demonstrates that those who take the virus seriously and put in place strict sensible measures and who follow the science rather than politics have had a far better success rate in controlling this virus. Those in Power must realize that health and well being of the people can never be compromised or used as pawns in the game of politics. People should always come before profit and politics!!! Adv. Aires Rodrigues C/G-2, Shopping Complex Ribandar Retreat Ribandar – Goa – 403006 Mobile No: 9822684372 Office Tel No: (0832) 2444012 Email: airesrodrigu...@gmail.com You can also reach me on Facebook.com/ AiresRodrigues Twitter@rodrigues_aires www.airesrodrigues.in
[Goanet] World Goa Day - Jazz Goa
An eclectic collection of Goa-themed songs with a jazz flavour by a diverse mix of artistes for the recent Goa Day. Many I have heard before, some new. All done with zest and verve. Colin D’Cruz is to modern day Goa music as Mario Miranda was to cartooning. I know little about him, hear his product a lot, but from what I view on cyberspace he showcases worthy Goa talent which might have otherwise gone unnoticed. https://youtu.be/i8QXdJKdwqo Happy listening. Roland. Toronto.
Re: [Goanet] History Repeats Itself
Joao, The most religious people are those who were never were able to question religion. Mervyn On Sunday, September 12, 2021, 8:43 PM, Joao Barros-Pereira wrote: did our parents give us freedom to choose our religion? did brainwashing start from an early age? no freedom to discover for ourselves truth and sadly are we doing to our children what our parents did to us? what does joao want to say?
[Goanet-News] The Inquisition (Spanish)... two views
How Bad was the Spanish Inquisition? (Short Animated Documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrjbtvKfPFk Timewatch: The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition (1994) BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY-pS6iLFuc=115s ᐧ *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- Join a discussion on Goa-related issues by posting your comments on this or other issues via email to goa...@goanet.org See archives at http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/ *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
[Goanet] Gabe, a note.. Re: Women's U.S. FINAL..
Gabe, nice to see you back after a gap. Hope all's well. FN On Mon, 13 Sept 2021 at 15:27, Gabe Menezes wrote: > > https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/11/emma-raducanu-makes-tennis-history-with-stunning-us-open-final-win-15244746/?ito=upday >
[Goanet] Women's U.S. FINAL..
https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/11/emma-raducanu-makes-tennis-history-with-stunning-us-open-final-win-15244746/?ito=upday
Re: [Goanet] History Repeats Itself
good follower and religionist - your viewpoint is the same as the Muslims and other authoritative religions - never being able to question the religion you were born into is not spirituality or awareness whatever else it might be ... it is also making slavery into a something great which it is not ... On 9/13/21, Mervyn Lobo wrote: > Joao, The most religious people are those who were never were able to > question religion. Mervyn > > > > On Sunday, September 12, 2021, 8:43 PM, Joao Barros-Pereira > wrote: > > did > our parents > > give us > freedom > > to choose > our religion? > > did > brainwashing > > start from > an early age? > > no freedom > to discover > > for ourselves > truth > > and > sadly > > are we > doing > > to our > children > > what > our parents > > did > to us? > > what does joao want to say? > > > >
Re: [Goanet] Emma Raducanu is new US Open Champion
As amazing as Raducana's performance was the scores of 6-4, 6-3 in the Finals does not reflect the drama. For one, the 2nd match was well fought and a lot closer than the numbers indicate. When the score was 5-3 and at deuce, Fernandez rattled Raducana. But Emma caught a break. In losing the volley she hurt her knee slight she used the full medical time-out to pull herself together. Leylah was visibly upset at this convenient use of time, but there was nothing she could do. Them's the breaks. Leylah faced 3 top 10 seeds to reach the finals, Raducana didn't face any. But Emma won all her rounds in 2 sets. They are both great players. John -Original Message- From: Goanet [mailto:goanet-boun...@lists.goanet.org] On Behalf Of ELVIDIO MIRANDA Sent: September 11, 2021 11:46 PM To: Goanet Subject: [Goanet] Emma Raducanu is new US Open Champion Emma Raducanu is newUS Open Champion Elvidio Miranda The women's tennis circuit still keeps on churning up new Grand Slam winners. In fact, Britain's 18 year old No. 1 women's tennis player Emma Raducanu dominated the US Open championships at the Flushing Meadows' Arthur Ashe stadium in the final against Canada's 19 year old Leylah Annie Fernandez, 6-4, 6-3 to clinch her first Grand Slam title and go on to complete a fairy tale win without dropping a single set in the entire tournament. In the process, Emma created an upset in the tournament which featured many highly fancied players. For now, a certain Miss Emma Raducanu is the new darling pretty of the glamorous tennis world. She became the first British women's tennis player to win a major title since Virginia Wade won Wimbledon in 1977. In recent times, she joined the ranks of Iga Swiatek from Poland who won the French Open title last year having gone through the qualification rounds, a feat that makes it all the more creditable. Emma thus becomes the latest women's sensation of the competitive tennis world.
[Goanet] In Case You Didn’t Know
Sent to me citing a credit to Goutam Bhattacharya. But he is a sports journalist and associate editor of Ananda Bazar Patrika. I tried to trace the authorship but it is very difficult to find. The starting line “End of a Spectre...” is from the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It is also the beginning of a blog by Linda Macfarlane in Open Democracy about authoritarian capitalism. Another article with similar beginning talks about Europe. But this is about neither of them. The best course to to ignore who wrote it and concentrate on the contents. You will find it spellbinding. A spectre is haunting the United States — the spectre of decline. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by WWI, the British maintained a pretence of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. It wasn’t until the 1956 Suez debacle, when Britain was pressured by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the United Nations to withdraw its forces from Egypt — which it had invaded along with Israel and France following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal—that it became clear that its imperial days were over. America’s debut on the world stage was epoch-making. By 1913, it was a major economic power, albeit one with little interest in global matters. This changed with its intervention in WWI on the side of the Allied Powers, ensuring their victory. In 1940, America had a smaller army than Portugal or Bulgaria. Within 4 years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories. When the Japanese, within 6 weeks of Pearl Harbour, took control of 90% of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and, in 3 years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. Shipyards spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four-and-a-half days. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich. It was US industrial might and the blood of Russian soldiers that won the war. After the end of WWII, the US gradually replaced the British Empire as a dominant power in much of the world. With but 6% of the world’s population, it accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93% of all automobiles. In under 50 years, America stood victorious, as USSR collapsed. US domination was morally underpinned by its belief in “manifest destiny” and economically underpinned by the US dollar as the reserve currency, maintaining the massive gap between its economic might and its nearest rivals and its control of the airways and oil supply lines, and by its military might. America boasted a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. Affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labour, opportunity and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism. But there was a dark side. America never stood down in the wake of victory in WWII. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every 3 years than America did in the entire 20th century. The US military has become ever less able to win wars, even as its advantage in spending and in the amount and sophistication of its armaments has widened over its actual and potential rivals to an unprecedented level. America’s only unambiguous military victories since WWII came in the first Gulf War of 1991, a war with the strictly limited objective of expelling Iraq from Kuwait, and in various “police actions” against pathetically small and weak opponents in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. America is unique among the world’s dominant powers of the past 500 years in its repeated failure to achieve military objectives over decades. From the arrival at the airport to the high-speed train or subway trip into town, a visit to Europe and East Asia can seem to an American like a journey to a Tomorrowland, never to be realized in the United States outside
[Goanet] Rethinking Panjim's Cultural Capital (Times of India, 19/9/2021)
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/events/goa/its-time-to-rethink-panajis-cultural-capital/articleshow/86110577.cms An excellent decision from an unexpected source has cast another highlight on Panjim’s superb heritage infrastructure, where the success of both private and non-state actors serves to underline the Goa administration’s own entrenched failures over many years and across every political alignment. The latest snippet of good news came via Sudhir Jakhere, the senior superintendent of post offices (SSPO), who announced well-conceived plans to convert the upper floor of the postal service’s colonial-era headquarters into the first philately museum in this part of the country (there are much older ones in New Delhi, Calcutta and Allahabad). To his credit, SSPO Jakhere has formulated these plans in consultation with the philatelic community in India’s smallest state, which is already very excited about exhibitions to showcase Goa’s remarkable transcultural legacy in stamps. It is an extremely promising starting point. Just down the waterfront from the India Post building is another one-of-a-kind cultural showcase. In its own gorgeous, centuries-old state headquarters, the Indian Customs and Excise department maintains its only museum anywhere, which depicts the never-ending battle between smugglers and the officers tasked with thwarting them. Good stuff, but what of art? Where can we experience and understand the peerless legacy of Goa’s artistic heritage from Mesolithic-era petroglyphs first carved thousands of years ago right to the foundational figures of Indian modernism: Vasudeo Gaitonde and Francis Newton Souza? In addition, what of Indo-Portuguese furniture, which is elsewhere the centrepiece of grand collections like the V? How about the amazing history of photography in Goa, and by Goan photographers? Shouldn’t we have a diaspora museum, tracking our story around the world? What about Goa’s peerless musical legacy, in both Hindustani and Western classical music, with a highlight reel stretching from Bollywood to Jazz to Trance? For all this – and very much more – there is next to nothing. It is an unconscionable situation, perpetrated over decades of neglect, with generations of Goans compelled to grow up largely ignorant about their own historical, cultural, social, artistic and architectural heritage. Here, it should be noted that the Trindade collection in Fontainhas allows visitors to view a handful of masterpieces by the Goan exemplar of the Bombay School of painting. But that is the work of the Lisbon-based Fundação Oriente, and another Portuguese organization, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has been the steadfast supporter of the Museum of Christian Art in Old Goa (where the Indian government has also supplied significant funds). This doesn’t say very much about Goa’s own wherewithal even 60 solid years after decolonization. The truth is that it wasn’t always like this. The Kala Academy had an excellent collection of paintings (including two magnificent Gaitonde canvases that are currently unaccounted for), and the Institute Menezes Braganza (formerly named after Vasco da Gama) painstakingly built one of the greatest collections of modern art in India: signed lithographs by Impressionists like Renoir, Braque, and Pissarro. Until it became the pariah of successive administrations, there was a State Museum – albeit an extremely shabby one – where you could see some of these things. But it is also equally true that it doesn’t have to remain this way. Under the leadership of Prasad Lolayekar, who headed the Department of Art and Culture for a stellar decade until 2017, the state made many wise investments in improving and upgrading heritage infrastructure. Now, with new vacancies in another set of stunning buildings at Altinho – the former Lyceum Complex – as well as the pressing need to reinvent tourism for the post-pandemic area, there’s another chance to reposition Panjim as the most exciting cultural destination in India (which does happen, but only for short spurts such as IFFI or the Serendipity Arts Festival). That opportunity is real, but so are the threats. The state spent millions to renovate the Adil Shah palace, but then half was hijacked by bureaucrats who have no business being there. The same happened to the premises of Asia’s first public library. Similarly, the marvellous spaces in the Old GMC are irresponsibly misused as a warren of tiny offices that come to life only once a year during IFFI. There is no comprehensive plan, which indicates that Panjim needs its own director of art and culture, in order to live up to its inherent promise. Make no mistake, that potential is endlessly impressive. From the old PWD complex (which is awaiting adaptive reuse) to the Post Office and Customs museums, the flowing galleries of the Adil Shah Palace and old Goa Medical College, the former state library (still to be vacated), the Institute Menezes
[Goanet] GOA’S TOURISM INDUSTRY IN A GRAVE MUDDLE
Tourism, the backbone of Goa’s economy has now sadly deteriorated into total shambles and is in the utter doldrums. Even before the onset of the pandemic, the inflow of quality tourists had been very much on the decline for many years with visitors to Goa retreating for varied and valid reasons while moving elsewhere. The wretched infrastructure, the accident prone roads, erratic water and power supply, stray dogs and cattle infested beaches with garbage strewn all over and the very high taxes have been turning the tourists off. The inept infrastructure at the airport, railway stations and the bus terminals leave much to be desired. The traffic police instead of regulating free flow of traffic seem to be focused on what they are best at, on which less said the better. Besides due to the alarming crime rate with the increasing number of rapes, murders and thefts, Goa has unfortunately evolved as a very unsafe destination having been transformed into a gambling, prostitution and narcotics den. Our only solace is that the Talibans have not landed here. The authorities need to swiftly get their act together with a vision and sincerity to revive and regain lost ground and at least ensure that we don’t lose those leftovers of the once flourishing Tourism trade and industry. Adv. Aires Rodrigues C/G-2, Shopping Complex Ribandar Retreat Ribandar – Goa – 403006 Mobile No: 9822684372 Office Tel No: (0832) 2444012 Email: airesrodrigu...@gmail.com You can also reach me on Facebook.com/ AiresRodrigues Twitter@rodrigues_aires www.airesrodrigues.in
