Edited by Eddie Fernandes editor@goanvoice.org.uk

Russian women discuss safety issues in Goa.
31 Oct: Woman Ru. Machine translation.  click here

Calgary: Dr. John Fernandes: Boomers at a turning point for health
29 Oct: Calgary Herald. ... Boomers comprise the bulk of Dr. John Fernandes's family practice in northwest Calgary and he's more optimistic about their health status... "They're a lot more health conscious than they use to be. And they're getting healthier ," says Fernandes ... however, there is "an increasing paranoia" that the health-care system is deteriorating."  click here

Fear Factor: All Souls Day & HalLoween
31 Oct: Times of India. For eons, Goan villages would echo the taunts of youngsters out to haunt on the night before All Souls' Day (on November 2). Anything found outside the house was easy fodder for a prank... Over the years, the tradition, loosely identified as 'the day of the dead' has changed ... has Halloween replaced Goa's old All Souls' Day eve tradition? ... 629 words.  click here

Death: Mary Pinto
31 Oct: Morrod, Sangolda, Goa. MARY JOSEPHINE PINTO (Born 1918). Wife of late Camillo Xavier Pinto (Ex East Africa-Railway’s & Harbours). Funeral date will be announced later. Photo at the link.  click here

WHO THE BLEEP CARES. Weekly column by Selma Carvalho.
98. Who the bleep cares about Luis de Assis Correia?

Last year, seized by a not-so-youthful naiveté, I wanted to record the lives of Great Goans. Having read a bit too much of John Updike and his relentless essays on American and British artists, writers and poets who have been so meticulously biographed and feeling a certain expansive, emptiness in this same region as far as our own intelligentsia went, I was at once filled with the hubris of the naïve and the ambition of the idiotic which lulled me into thinking that herculean tasks are indeed possible equipped with just a tape-recorder and a pen.

I'd read Luis de Assis Correia's Goa Through The Mists Of History - he has since followed it up with the release of Portuguese India - and been impressed enough to persuade Correia into agreeing to an interview. "Watch out for an elderly man standing near the fruit vendors," he told me. Getting off the tube at Harrow, I needn't have worried. It's not easy to miss an elegant, tall Goan man at a London tube station.

Correia was born in 1928 in the village of Velim, Goa, the same year Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was to become Finance Minister and begin his ascent to power in what would become Portugal's Estado Novo. It is difficult to say what forces of history shape personal lives. Are single incidents like the rise of Salazar mere blips on the continuum of time or do they affect us personally? Did the 16 years of Republicanism that preceded Salazar create the greatest flourishing of Goan intelligentsia responsible for ideas of equality that permeated the Goan consciousness? Or perhaps equality among men is an aspiration that is endemic in the human consciousness and doesn't need revolutions or religions to stir it to life. Correia's grandfather and namesake, a man he describes as an "exceptionally brilliant person," championed caste and racial equality at a time when it was unfashionable to do the former and decidedly dangerous to address the latter.

Like so many young Goan men, his grandfather had been ear-marked for that solemn vocation, which one embarks on with much zeal and absolute faith in the unseen, the priesthood. But he got into a polemic with the Archbishop of Goa and the Director of his seminary on the finer points of discriminatory practices in the priesthood. This rather premature bid for equality in the naves of Goa's Church resulted in his departure from the Church and the stigmatization of his family.

But reading Correia's accounts of Goa's history, it is hard to decipher what his own feelings are on the Republic or Salazar or the Church for he feels a Historian's voice must not permeate his writing. His responsibility is only to report the facts, a sort of medieval journalist traveling forward in time. In the 21st century, when personal comment is so difficult to avoid, when controversy and sensationalism of revisionism is what sells history books, Correia has been quite resolute in avoiding both.

Correia's interest in history goes back to his childhood, which he remembers as being surrounded by books. He had a private mestre who tutored him at home in Latin. His mother taught him Portuguese and he later attended a Portuguese Secondary school. The images of World War II blur in during our conversation; the sugar shortages, the gasoline rationing and perhaps most disturbingly the death of his father, Chrisol de Assis Correia, when the passenger ship he was on board the S S Calabria, waiting to join his own ship the S. S Vasna of the Royal Navy Hospital, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in 1940, off the coast of Ireland. Correia also remembers with clarity the harrowing air-raids by the Japanese while he was schooling at St. Mary's in Broadway, Madras, (what was then called Madras and is today called Chennai).

After a stint with Air India in Bombay, he arrived in Nairobi, Kenya in 1956, just seven years before Kenya was to get its Independence from Britain. Correia eventually came to rub shoulders with the likes of Pio Gama-Pinto and Murumbi, who he says was a "very nice man." Correia also struck a close friendship with Tom Mboya, founder of the Nairobi's People Congress Party and an active member of the political establishment around and shortly following Kenya's independence. Correia was heading a travel agency in Nairobi and they were both instrumental players in the Airlift Africa project, working with the African-American Students Foundation in the United States, to provide air-passage to Kenyan students who had won scholarships in American universities. The conversation, amidst a din of recorded music in the café we were sitting at, turns suddenly to Barack Obama Sr, who was one of the students in these batches, on his way to Hawaii, little knowing his progeny would forever alter the course of American history. Correia shows me a black and white picture of Obama Sr, along with his fellow batchmates and I'm tempted to convince Correia to let me scan the picture for my personal archives and public posterity - at least that's the hope.

Amidst the turmoil that followed Kenyan Independence, the corruption, the scramble for power, Mboya's own life was to end tragically in a political assassination in 1969, at the young age of 39.

Correia made his way to England. Today he splits his time between Goa and the UK, devoting much of his life to his love of reading and recording Goa's historical past.

Do leave your feedback at carvalho_sel@yahoo.com

Russian women discuss safety issues in Goa.
31 Oct: Woman Ru. Machine translation.  click here

Calgary: Dr. John Fernandes: Boomers at a turning point for health
29 Oct: Calgary Herald. ... Boomers comprise the bulk of Dr. John Fernandes's family practice in northwest Calgary and he's more optimistic about their health status... "They're a lot more health conscious than they use to be. And they're getting healthier ," says Fernandes ... however, there is "an increasing paranoia" that the health-care system is deteriorating."  click here

Fear Factor: All Souls Day & HalLoween
31 Oct: Times of India. For eons, Goan villages would echo the taunts of youngsters out to haunt on the night before All Souls' Day (on November 2). Anything found outside the house was easy fodder for a prank... Over the years, the tradition, loosely identified as 'the day of the dead' has changed ... has Halloween replaced Goa's old All Souls' Day eve tradition? ... 629 words.  click here

Death: Mary Pinto
31 Oct: Morrod, Sangolda, Goa. MARY JOSEPHINE PINTO (Born 1918). Wife of late Camillo Xavier Pinto (Ex East Africa-Railway’s & Harbours). Funeral date will be announced later. Photo at the link.  click here

WHO THE BLEEP CARES. Weekly column by Selma Carvalho.
98. Who the bleep cares about Luis de Assis Correia?

Last year, seized by a not-so-youthful naiveté, I wanted to record the lives of Great Goans. Having read a bit too much of John Updike and his relentless essays on American and British artists, writers and poets who have been so meticulously biographed and feeling a certain expansive, emptiness in this same region as far as our own intelligentsia went, I was at once filled with the hubris of the naïve and the ambition of the idiotic which lulled me into thinking that herculean tasks are indeed possible equipped with just a tape-recorder and a pen.

I'd read Luis de Assis Correia's Goa Through The Mists Of History - he has since followed it up with the release of Portuguese India - and been impressed enough to persuade Correia into agreeing to an interview. "Watch out for an elderly man standing near the fruit vendors," he told me. Getting off the tube at Harrow, I needn't have worried. It's not easy to miss an elegant, tall Goan man at a London tube station.

Correia was born in 1928 in the village of Velim, Goa, the same year Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was to become Finance Minister and begin his ascent to power in what would become Portugal's Estado Novo. It is difficult to say what forces of history shape personal lives. Are single incidents like the rise of Salazar mere blips on the continuum of time or do they affect us personally? Did the 16 years of Republicanism that preceded Salazar create the greatest flourishing of Goan intelligentsia responsible for ideas of equality that permeated the Goan consciousness? Or perhaps equality among men is an aspiration that is endemic in the human consciousness and doesn't need revolutions or religions to stir it to life. Correia's grandfather and namesake, a man he describes as an "exceptionally brilliant person," championed caste and racial equality at a time when it was unfashionable to do the former and decidedly dangerous to address the latter.

Like so many young Goan men, his grandfather had been ear-marked for that solemn vocation, which one embarks on with much zeal and absolute faith in the unseen, the priesthood. But he got into a polemic with the Archbishop of Goa and the Director of his seminary on the finer points of discriminatory practices in the priesthood. This rather premature bid for equality in the naves of Goa's Church resulted in his departure from the Church and the stigmatization of his family.

But reading Correia's accounts of Goa's history, it is hard to decipher what his own feelings are on the Republic or Salazar or the Church for he feels a Historian's voice must not permeate his writing. His responsibility is only to report the facts, a sort of medieval journalist traveling forward in time. In the 21st century, when personal comment is so difficult to avoid, when controversy and sensationalism of revisionism is what sells history books, Correia has been quite resolute in avoiding both.

Correia's interest in history goes back to his childhood, which he remembers as being surrounded by books. He had a private mestre who tutored him at home in Latin. His mother taught him Portuguese and he later attended a Portuguese Secondary school. The images of World War II blur in during our conversation; the sugar shortages, the gasoline rationing and perhaps most disturbingly the death of his father, Chrisol de Assis Correia, when the passenger ship he was on board the S S Calabria, waiting to join his own ship the S. S Vasna of the Royal Navy Hospital, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in 1940, off the coast of Ireland. Correia also remembers with clarity the harrowing air-raids by the Japanese while he was schooling at St. Mary's in Broadway, Madras, (what was then called Madras and is today called Chennai).

After a stint with Air India in Bombay, he arrived in Nairobi, Kenya in 1956, just seven years before Kenya was to get its Independence from Britain. Correia eventually came to rub shoulders with the likes of Pio Gama-Pinto and Murumbi, who he says was a "very nice man." Correia also struck a close friendship with Tom Mboya, founder of the Nairobi's People Congress Party and an active member of the political establishment around and shortly following Kenya's independence. Correia was heading a travel agency in Nairobi and they were both instrumental players in the Airlift Africa project, working with the African-American Students Foundation in the United States, to provide air-passage to Kenyan students who had won scholarships in American universities. The conversation, amidst a din of recorded music in the café we were sitting at, turns suddenly to Barack Obama Sr, who was one of the students in these batches, on his way to Hawaii, little knowing his progeny would forever alter the course of American history. Correia shows me a black and white picture of Obama Sr, along with his fellow batchmates and I'm tempted to convince Correia to let me scan the picture for my personal archives and public posterity - at least that's the hope.

Amidst the turmoil that followed Kenyan Independence, the corruption, the scramble for power, Mboya's own life was to end tragically in a political assassination in 1969, at the young age of 39.

Correia made his way to England. Today he splits his time between Goa and the UK, devoting much of his life to his love of reading and recording Goa's historical past.

Do leave your feedback at carvalho_sel@yahoo.com