What is it about *Ballad for Goa* that draws me in? When I listen to its aching melody, why does my heart break? The composition arouses emotions in me that are hard to place, a certain sadness that, despite its implausibility, feels deeply personal. And of all six tracks on *Hum Dono*, each self-sustained works of musical genius, I kept finding myself returning to it. It possesses a particular ennui that feels at once familiar, pleasurable, and devastating.
I like to think it has something to do with the particular essence it conjures, familiar to any Goan: *saudade*, that bittersweet melancholy embedded in Goan DNA. The Portuguese essayist Eduardo Lourenço once described the temperament as memory itself, an “awareness of the essential temporality of the being who has and cannot have on himself a higher contemplation than that of himself as a past in feverish quest for the future.” Goans exist, after all, in a state of permanent nostalgia given the changing status of our homeland. *Saudade* in the modern Goan context is often interpreted as a longing for susegad, that ineluctable Goan way of life that is relaxed, in perfect harmony with the cadences of the natural environment, which prioritises the dignity and interior life of the individual. Susegad is the antithesis to capitalism: it rejects notions of efficiency and expendability, takes a perfect contentment with the rhythms of life. It evinces a way of being that is fundamentally impossible given the pressures of modern life, and the tragic fate of Goa in contemporary India. https://scroll.in/article/1052160/ballad-for-goa-guitarist-amancio-dsilva-strikes-a-nostalgic-note-for-an-identity-being-erased