GOANVOICE DAILY NEWSLETTER SUN 04 APRIL, 2010
| ANNOUNCEMENT | ||
| Padma winners in Goa unite against 'excessive' mining | ||
30 Mar: Times of India. Goa's Padma award winners have got together to urge the
Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) not to lift the moratorium on
mining till the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI)
completes an assessment on the impact of past mining activities on the state …
Mario Miranda, Ravindra Kelekar, Remo Fernandes, Suresh Amonkar, Norma Alvares
and Maria Aurora Couto have signed the petition. Wendell Rodricks has also added
his signature … 160 words. Click
here. You too can sign the petition before 15 Apr. 2010 and urge your contacts to do likewise. Click here. | ||
Photo Gallery | ||
| Video + Canadian TV: Thalassa: On the road to Goa | ||
The Goa episode of this programme was broadcast in France, Channel 3 on 2 Apr. and is to be shown on 9 Apr. 8.00 pm to 9:30 pm. in Canada – TV5 (35 Rogers; 145 Bell; 761 Shaw) “In recent years, Goa has become the place most "wired" in India, a holiday resort for the gilded youth of New Delhi or Bombay… Francisco de Souza, defender of "the Goan identity," guides us in the guise of Fado, through Goa Portuguese colonial houses, markets and religious festivals…” For a video recording of the programme (with French dialogue) select the link below.
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| Book Review: Tanya Mendonsa: Sensuous feast | ||
 3 Apr: The Hindu. The Dreaming House, a collection of a sizeable volume of poems marks a new entrant on the canvas of Indian poetry, Tanya Mendonsa has oscillated from Kolkata to Paris to Goa with her exhibition of paintings but it was the Goan village of Moira where she found her voice and calling … 640 words.
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| Frankfurt: Anjana Schmidt nee Lobo | ||
3 Apr: Fuldaer Zeitung (Germany). Anjana
Schmidt is the ambassador of Indian cuisine … the pretty Anjana is not
only charming but a fantastic cook and teaches her art to others … she was
born in Bombay as Anjana Lobo, her family comes from Goa … She worked as
a travel agent and met her husband, a German investment banker, in Hong Kong …
She also organises culinary tours to India.. 372 words. Machine translation.
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| Happy Easter | ||
 Easter Greetings to our readers! | ||
| Modern Goan Literature | ||
 4 Apr: Selma Carvalho reviews Peter Nazareth’s book this week. $ 29.95 inc. postage (airmail, worldwide) & packing.
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News Summary | ||
| Death: Dr Maria De Sequeira Gill 2 Apr: Chandigarh, India. DR MARIA JULIA DE SEQUEIRA GILL. Beloved wife of Col. Gurdeep Singh Gill. Daughter of late Dr. Jack and Lilia De Sequeira. Funeral at Campal, Goa on 5 Apr. | ||
| Book Review: The Island: Murder in Paradise 4 Apr: The Observer (UK). Murder and occultism lies at the heart of Sarah Singleton's The Island, which opens with every parent's gap year nightmare scenario. Fresh off the plane to Goa, 18-year-old Otto falls for a mysterious, tattooed beauty on the beach, then discovers her dead body on the sand after an all-night rave. He finds himself a prime suspect in her murder… they unravel the mystery behind the girl's death, encountering violence, corruption and a drugs racket along the way… Full Text. more info... | ||
| Drooling at Goan roadside delicacies 5 Apr: Navhind Times. This is a story of Mike Mehta, teacher, a Konkani actor, now a practicing lawyer, who was the first to start the `Sigdi’ trend (open air oven) in Goa … in 1985 he started the first ever roadside barbecue `sigdi’, at the vicinity of the Old Market area of Margao… Over 100s of these now official open air portable stalls are doing roaring business in Margao. 691 words. Full Text. | ||
| Observer: Top 10 Online Last Week 4 Apr. The Observer (UK) … 5. Goa: property frenzy and crime poison the hippie dream. Full Text. | ||
| Goa: More areas lose rural character 4 Apr: Times of India. Goa’s march towards urbanization continues with the Census Operations Department recently declaring 26 new villages as census towns. Goa now has 70 towns … The state had 30 census towns in the 2001 census. Villages are declared as census towns if the population crosses 5,000… 335 words. Full Text. | ||
| 'No mechanism to keep tab on illegal mining in Goa' 3 Apr: Sify. There is no mechanism in Goa's only major port to keep tabs on illegal iron ore being exported out of the state, a senior official said Saturday… Of the 40 million tonnes iron ore exported by the MPT, 36 million tonnes is bound for China… 221 words. Full Text. | ||
| WHO THE BLEEP CARES. Weekly column by Selma Carvalho. 75. Who the Bleep cares about Goan writing, mourning and renewal? It is perhaps a tragedy that we, as Goans, remain ignorant about our literary heritage. That we seek definitions of ourselves in the superfluous and cling to them as the truth. In fact, the core of definitions lie in the soft-centre of our literature; the truths uttered by mad poets and writers who seldom received any recognition beyond that of a few friends and critics, but who wrote into the wee hours of the morn because their minds sought release from the frenzy of their souls. And there as darkness crept upon them, they savagely tore their souls to shreds and laid them on crisp-white pages for examination. A few died with unpublished manuscripts, mourning the lack of interested publishers. So it is a glorious treat for the senses to come across the recently released Pivoting on the point of return: Modern Goan Literature (Goa1556, 2010). At first glance I was under the mistaken impression that it was just a collection of writings by Goan authors and was pleasantly surprised to find it also included an introspection on Goan writing by Peter Nazareth et al. Nazareth best describes himself as an African writer of Goan origin and is most renowned for his novel, The General is Up. What classifies itself as Goan writing is a matter of subjective judgment. The Goan writing in English does not write like an Englishman, nor does he I assume writing in Portuguese write like the Portuguese. But were he to merely borrow languages, he would become a shabby street-side mime without a voice of his own. Instead, his use of language is evocative of an Impressionist artist who stabs away at his canvas using colour as only the medium to draw us images which reside in his head. "As the harvests of the vangana appear along the meadows and the wind ripples the green horizon, the still-damp earth shivers with an intense, fertile joy. They feast their eyes on the stalks, patiently hoping that the grain will become so fat and golden that it falls of its own accord." Wrote Orlando da Costa, in O signo da ira, just one of the stories included in the book. Orlando in one broad sweep has captured the colour palette of the golden paddy, scorched by the still sun and awaiting the calluses of peasant hands to reap the bounty of sweaty-toil. Consider this description by Lambert Mascarenhas in Sorrowing lies my land: "The hour of eight almost marked the end of activity in our village. At sunset our people called out to their fowls and pigs to come home, and then lit their homemade sisslios, which hardly dispelled the darkness." I know this village. I come from this village where silence is your constant companion after eight in the night, where dogs mourn the dark in a whiny chorus and brown moths flit aimlessly in search of light. Only a Goan perhaps can understand the dichotomy of this quiet, which is at once comforting and distressing, at once a statement of complacency and struggle. An examination of this quietude which is so much a part of the Goan consciousness must come from a Goan. If the writers delight us in their descriptions, they betray us slightly by the dialogue. Playing a mental trick, if I translate the dialogue into Konkani and carry it to the village, it rings untrue. But this is a minor flaw of a mind that writes in a foreign language and if aspiration and hope lies at the centre of the story, we are better served by the delicious incredulity of the characters rather than a staid reality. Although column space does not permit me to present my full appreciation of this sensual literary offering, a criticism not specific to this book but of Goan literary writing in general, is that while Goa is not about sun, sea and sand neither should it be reduced to colonisation, caste and cultural identity. This obsession with our past is beginning to overpower us, to the point of stultifying us. We are caught in the morass of endlessly examining our mandos and mangoes when nothing new seems to grow on the bleak horizon of the Goan intellectual landscape. The voices of our younger literary writers must grow louder and the sphere of self-examination becomes wider, deeper, plumbing the depths of depravity and rising to the heights of discovery. The zeitgeist of our times must reflect the complexity of our own sexuality, political consciousness and social responsibilities. We have grown past the experience of milieu and are yet to leap into anything else of more substance. The period of our mourning has been much too long. The renewal is not yet upon us. The challenge for my friend, Frederick Noronha, the man behind the success of the publishing house Goa1556, is to bring out an apt sequel which deepens the discourse and pushes the envelop. For more information on this book and others published by Goa1556, click here. Rates quoted are P&P included. | ||