How did the Goan migrant go from humble seafarer to clerical backbone of the British Empire?

By Selma Carvalho

'There is no phenomenon more permanent in the history of mankind than the migration of men from place to place in quest of easier labour and more abundant means of subsistence.’ An editor at The Times of London wrote that in 1864, when Europeans were heading en masse to North America. The reason why human beings migrate almost invariably boils down to simple economics. Yet more fascinating are the forces that enable and, indeed, empower certain societies to be particularly migratory, and create a mindset that lends itself to migration.

 

Goa is a unique laboratory in which to study migration. The Christian community of Goa is almost entirely migration-driven, a phenomenon expressed through its folkloric songs and literature. The Hindu community, on the other hand, until recently migrated only to nearby states to strengthen trade links – and, in earlier times, to escape religious persecution by the Portuguese, who conquered Goa in 1510 and embarked on an evangelising mission. Goa today is said to have one of the most dispersed diasporas in the world, predominantly settled in Canada, UK and the Gulf countries, though clusters can be found in regions as remote as the west coast of Africa, Iceland and Fiji. Interestingly, emigration is still skewed in favour of Catholic Goans, mostly from the south of Goa. Catholicism and a Western lifestyle facilitates an almost seamless assimilation into European and North American societies. The diaspora is now into its third and fourth generation in the UK and already into its second generation in Canada.

 

By the dawn of the 20th century, Goa had become a bon vivant, living on borrowed money. According to British records from 1908, Goa had imports of 6.1 million rupees, as against exports of less than 2.2 million. For a tiny colony that could boast of no more substantive exports than dried fish, betel nut, salt, manure, mango and small amounts of manganese, it nonetheless imported large quantities of wine, butter, silk, sugar, coffee, perfume and tobacco. But while a few Goans sat in the grandeur of chandeliered reception halls nursing an intellectual ennui, for vast sections of this agrarian society it was a very modest life. The lack of infrastructure and industry meant there were few employment opportunities besides basic trades such as tailoring, carpentry, masonry and baking.

 

By god and sea
What forces shape a society’s collective psyche? Among Goan Catholics, the most powerful agent is their religion. By the 1800s, the clergy in Goa was almost entirely made up of native Goans dominated by, curiously enough, the upper tiers of a hierarchical system inherited from the former Hindu caste-based structures of power. Although this might appear paradoxical, it was not particularly different from what prevailed in Europe, where the upper echelons of the Catholic Church were filled with sons of the nobility.

 

But however conservative the machinery of the Church was in upholding an inequitable social order, the central tenet of this religion was equity in the eyes of a monotheistic god. A relationship with a personal god meant the self was of the utmost importance, and a profound understanding of free will became part of the collective psyche. Christianity broke the stranglehold of the communal. Community would continue to be important; but at a very critical level the Goan understood the elevation of the individual above that of the collective, and this understanding placed him in a favourable position. The freedom led him to barter his services as he saw fit and enhanced his market value. The genesis of the wider Goan diaspora – the one that eventually sailed to Africa, the arid deserts of the Gulf and the bitter cold of England – belongs to that much caricatured Goan, the seaman, known in Goa as tarvotti (from the Sanskrit-Konkani word tarun, meaning boat). It gradually became apparent to the hitherto land-bound agrarian Goan that it was possible to travel long distances and return enriched by the experience. Men were no longer manacled to the existence into which they were born; rather, the sense of fatalism that accompanies agrarian societies subject to nature’s temperaments was dissipating, infused by the confidence of the seaman.

 

In 1916, a memorandum prepared by the British Ministry of Munitions states its intent to import Indian labour into Britain to help with the World War I effort. The only problem was, ‘When India is under consideration, [we have] always to reckon with the caste question but the following races which supply men to the engineering trades are likely to be available without serious religious and social difficulties.’ These ‘races’ included Parsees, Muslims and Goans, the last of which were deemed to be good ‘fitters and turners’, and of which there were at the time about 5000 to 6000 employed in railway workshops and dockyards in British India.

 

It is the expansion of the British Empire and its ascendancy as a sea power that mirrors the trajectory of Goan migration. Young, able-bodied men who came of age around the late 1800s found lucrative employment on board British India ships plying from Calcutta and Bombay round the Cape of Good Hope to Europe, and then setting sail again from Southampton to the Americas.

 

Ship manifests show that a Goan sailor by the name of C D Castelino, working on board the S S Croydon as a cook, landed in San Francisco in 1911. By the 1920s, Goans had become veteran seamen, having docked in far-flung ports and experienced the dangers and uncertainties of life at sea. Two of them, Domingos de Souza and Pedro Goenxende, arrived in Havana, Cuba, in June 1927, having set sail from Calcutta on board the S S Matoppo. (Domingo was perhaps the senior seafarer, for while his wage was GBP 5.12 per month, Pedro’s was just GBP 2.12, wages being tied to type of service and, more importantly, length of service.) Both men were jailed in Havana for some debatable infraction and discharged from their employment, abandoned by their shipmaster in Havana with nothing but a sea chest and a tin box between them. Eventually, the tarvottis were repatriated to Goa, after deducting their ‘expenses’ from wages due.

 

However precarious was life with the sea as an unpredictable mistress, it was an existence rife with excitement and possibility. The Goan had inadvertently become an intrepid explorer in his own right. His expeditions, unlike those of European explorers, were not funded by the government but rather by necessity and his own gumption. The English explorers Richard F Burton and Captain Hanning Speke had with them two Goans, Valentine and Caetano, when they set out on their second expedition into the interior of Central Africa in 1856. Although Burton typically describes the Goans as receiving exorbitant wages for doing a bit of everything and nothing well, he does commend Valentino for learning the Kiswahili language quickly, and for being able to read the chronometer and thermometer. Caetano, who suffered terrible fevers and near insanity from epileptic fits, was nonetheless a courageous man, who thought nothing of diving into crocodile-infested waters or throwing himself into the middle of a rowdy crowd.

 

A whole class of Goans previously struggling on the lower economic and social rungs of society found the means to improve their lot in life. Meanwhile, British captains and officers refused to sail without their favourite Goan butlers. These seafarers returned home with larger-than-life stories of strange sightings at sea, smooth sails and storms, of jungles and cities, some embellished beyond recognition. This generated in humble Goans an even deeper desire to travel beyond the confines of their villages, and engage in a beckoning world that seemed endlessly wide and open.

 

Clifford Pereira, a scholar of historical geography has established that Goan sailors settled around London’s dockland areas. There is every possibility, he says, that some of those who plied the busy route between Bombay and Zanzibar (and onwards) settled around Zanzibar port, operating liquor shops and ice factories. Indeed, wherever a port of call gained prominence, fledging Goan communities could be found, be it in Mozambique and Mombasa on the east coast of Africa or Cabo Verde on the west coast. These pioneering souls laid the foundation for what would become the worldwide diaspora. A 1937 report compiled by the British Royal Navy offers insight into just how valuable Goans had become as seamen. ‘It has long been recognised that the Goans as a race are particularly well adapted to these trades [stewards and cooks],’ it states, ‘and are generally accepted as being more efficient than other Indian races. A further advantage is that, being Christians, no religious difficulties arise in regard to handling food and wine.’

 

In service of empire
There is a common perception that it was Goa’s educated middle class that was prone to migration. But anecdotal evidence suggests that it was initially tailors, cooks and carpenters that travelled on to East Africa – as evidenced by the Saint Francis Xavier Goan Tailors Society, formed in Mombasa as early as 1905. The second phase of out-migration to Africa was from the literate class, not necessarily college-educated but with enough schooling to be adept at clerical and administrative jobs. They applied for jobs as clerks in the administration of the railways being built from the interiors of Uganda to the port of Mombasa on the east coast of Kenya. At least initially, the railway proved to be a bad investment, and the colonisation of Kenya by the British was in part to make the railway financially viable. As Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) came under British control, Goans thronged the British Civil Services. A 1921 census puts the number of Goans in Kenya at 2000; a 1931 census puts the count in Tanganyika at 1722.

 

By 1900, a Goan cook could hope to earn between GBP 2 and 3 per month, commanding twice the rate of his African counterpart. By 1920, Goan clerks were earning between GBP 17 and 30 per month in East Africa. Indeed, such clerks were so numerous in the administration of the British Empire in East Africa that public opinion back in England eventually enquired as to why so many ‘Portuguese nationals’ were needed in the services of the empire. But such was their fondness for Goans that district officers in remote outposts relied almost entirely on them, often leaving the running of the offices in their hands when they were out on tour. This gave rise to the saying, ‘The keys of all the safes in East Africa are in the hands of the Goans.’

 

The British relationship with Goans was ambivalent; subjecting them to all the prejudice they felt towards non-white populations. They never absolved Goans from the indignity of residential segregation, segregated public washrooms and the tacit prohibition against miscegenation and a ceiling on upward mobility on the work-front. Yet the British valued Goans tremendously, forming relationships based on genuine mutual respect and trust. They were unfailingly described by British colonial officers as the backbone of the Civil Services, people of ‘high quality’, meticulous in their work and devotedly loyal to the Empire.

 

The Goan became a prominent member of colonial Africa, not through a process of legislative power but rather through a partnership based on work and social contacts. As the relationship grew, Goans inevitably became intermediaries between the British and the indigenous populations in many African colonies, in a world where upholding racial hegemony required unequal partners. Goans were considered Portuguese nationals, and as such distinct from Indians. For purposes of census records, tax and revenue collection and government correspondence, they were diligently accorded a separate notation.

The Catholic Goan often comes in for criticism for being so intensely emigration driven that it creates a vacuum back in Goa. But though we might judge the motives of those who move away from the motherland, at another level we all understand that primal need in human beings to migrate for survival and sustenance. (ENDS)

 

 

Selma Carvalho is a writer based in London.

 

Source: Himal, Issue: December 2010

Symphony in Blues

Symphony in Blues
by Vivek Menezes


June 11th 2010, and a bright midsummer evening in Moscow. We’re in one of the iconic buildings of the Russian capital, the opulent Hall of Columns, with its spectacular crystal chandeliers ablaze with light for Russia Day, that country’s equivalent of the American 4th of July. This year, there’s more reason to celebrate – it’s the finale of the Festival of the World’s Symphony Orchestra’s and the audience of tuxedoed sophisticates is hushed, rapt with attention and focused on the familiar music ringing in their ears.

It’s Beethoven’s ultimate masterpiece, the 9th Symphony, so central to music history that the original format of the compact disc was expanded from 10cm to 12cm specifically to fit it. The audience sighs almost imperceptibly when the ‘Ode to Joy’ rings out, the rousing chorus on which the official Anthem of Europe is played. It’s undoubtedly the most familiar and famous single piece of music ever written.

But zoom in closer, and you realize there is something decidedly unusal about this symphony orchestra that’s deep into Beethoven’s magnum opus. They’re not Russians, or Germans. In fact, they’re not from any of the cultures that sustain western music, or even from the Far East which has embraced it so successfully in recent generations. In fact, we are looking on at the international debut of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), a four-year-old operation that’s sponsored by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, the “fulfillment of a dream” of Khushroo Suntook, the NCPA chairman.

“I grew up listening to the ‘Ode to Joy’, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony” smiles Ashley Rego, a 25-year-old violinist who has been with the SOI since its inception. “Moscow is known for producing the best string players in the world, so playing there is just a great honour.” Rego is one of several Goans who play full-time for the SOI, but a close look at the rest of the players reveals that Indians constitute just a handful of 109 members. In fact, the SOI is a grab-bag of musicians from 14 different countries, with a particularly large contingent representing Kazakhstan, the home country of the SOI’s music director, Marat Bisengaliev.

The Kazakh came to the attention of Suntook in London, where he impressed the NCPA official at a concert he happened to attend. He was invited to visit Mumbai with his orchestra, and eventually to set up the SOI in 2006. When this ambitious new venture was launched, there were only 10 Indians recruited to play in a crowd of musicians from the ex-Soviet Union. After four years, there are now 15 Indian regular players, so a bit more than ten per cent of the total contingent, but still a considerable distance from constituting a “national” orchestra worth the name.

The Moscow concert does constitute a milestone for the SOI, and bodes well for the future development of a classical music culture in the subcontinent But forgotten in all the hoopla about this “pioneering Indian orchestra” is that it comes after long decades of purposeful stifling of western classical music in India, and a full 52 years after the first proper symphony orchestra in India was founded, and then disbanded. What’s more, the Indian Symphony Orchestra that performed several times in 1951 and 1952 under the baton of the visionary Anthony Gonsalves was constituted entirely of Indians, and even played a repertoire of “raga-based symphonies” that remains completely unique in the history of western classical music.

**

Most people don’t realize that so-called “western music” was being played by Indians in India, and already well-established hundreds of years before the sitar was invented, or tablas made an appearance in what would much later become enshrined as Hindustani music. Wrong-headed nationalists like to trump the credentials of the music that emerged from post-Mughal north India as somehow more “Indian” than, say, a violin concerto. It’s an absurd and ahistorical argument, completely ignorant of the history of India’s western coastline.

For thousands of years, the Konkan and Malabar coasts have been engaged in trade and cultural exchange across the Arabian Sea. Every discrete trading community from the Meditteranean all the way down the East African coastline came and went from the ports of this spice coast. Christianity had established permanent roots in India before it arrived in Europe, there were significant Christian communities all along the Konkan and Malabar coastline many centuries before England, Spain or Portugal even saw their first convert.

So there must have been so-called “western” music played in this part of India long before Alfonso da Albuquerque seized Goa in 1510 (many years before the first Mughal set foot in India). However, it is the spate of church-building that he set off that really gave the music Indian roots. The Portuguese proved indifferent to most kinds of education, for themselves and for their subjects as well. However, they did see a need for many musicians to play church music in the wake of the coerced conversions that created hundreds of thousands of Konkani Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Within months of his conquest of Goa, Albuquerque was already beseeching the King of Portugal to furnish organs for the churches that were coming up at full speed all over the new Estado da India. Within a generation, western instruments were rooted in Konkan catholic practice, church services were accompanied by the same mix of instruments as Europe: cornettos, violas, harpsichords.

By the seventeenth century, the native Goan’s expertise in church music had already become legendary. In 1683, the Italian traveler Sebastiani attended a mass in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and marveled “it was celebrated by seven choirs with the sweetest instrumental interludes. I felt I was in Rome. I could not believe how proficient these Canarese are in this music, how well they perform it, and with what facility.”

The centrality of music to the distinctly Goan mode of churchgoing was underlined by an historic 17th century decree by the Vatican. Rome declared that unlike the rest of the entire world, only the diocese of Goa would be allowed to use instruments (violin, clarinet and bass were specifically named) in their religious ceremonies which commemorated the three days of great mourning that culminate in Easter Sunday. These instruments and their practice had become that ingrained in the Goan way of life – a full hundred years before the first sitar is recorded to make an appearance in history.

The musical history of the Goans was again dramatically influenced in another direction when the British occupied the territory during the Napoleonic Wars that culminated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In that period, the British were delighted to encounter the Goans. They had no dietary taboos, so many became cooks to the colonialists. They were familiar with western clothing, so many became tailors across the Empire. And there were very many who could play western instruments, so thousands of men picked up their violins and trumpets, learned to play ‘God Save the Queen’, and trooped out of Goa to become professional musicians in Rangoon and Karachi, Aden and Singapore and all across the British Empire even to London’s famous Ritz Hotel (where a Goan pianist still tinkles away at teatime each Sunday).

Via the prism of this history, it seems extremely ironic that the Symphony Orchestra of India in 2010 has just a handful of Indian musicians scattered among a host of foreigners. It didn’t have to come to this – there was a Goan orchestra playing at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai as far back as 1916 and another in the 20’s called the Bombay Chamber Orchestra (led by the German, Edward Behr) which received huge acclaim from foreign visitors. Later, Dominic Pereira became the concertmaster of another promising fledgling orchestra full of Goans, the Bombay Philharmonic. Without interference, these musical shoots would have certainly flowered into a first-rate indigenous classical orchestra. But politics stifled the opportunity, and generation after generation of piano and violin and trumpet players from India were silenced, or forced to migrate to the West.

Some became subsumed into Bollywood. The Bandra-based editor and brilliant researcher, Naresh Fernandes has brought that period to life in a series of landmark essays. He writes, “until the 1980’s, India had no pop music save for Hindi film songs. Millions memorized and hummed the compositions of C. Ramachandra. Shankar and Jaikishan, Laxmikant and Pyarelal and SD Burman, whose names rolled by in large letters at the beginning of the movies. But the Sound of India was actually created by Goan musicians, men whose names flickered by in small type under the designation “arranger”. It’s clear. The Hindi film classics that resound across the subcontinent and in Indian homes around the world wouldn’t have been made without Goans.”

The last serious attempt to form an indigenous orchestra in India was also the most promising. It came from this world of Goans in Hindi cinema, the brainchild of Anthony Gonsalves, revered teacher of a generation of Bollywood composers, whose name was later immortalized in ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ by his grateful student, Pyarelal.

Gonsalves, an acknowledged musical genius, developed an abiding love for Raga-based music. “It struck me very hard in my heart and mind,” he is reported to have said. He became impassioned with creating symphonic music from ragas, and wrote several pioneering pieces of music in this vein including ‘Sonatina Indiana’ and ‘Concerto in Raag Sarang’. In 1958, Gonsalves paid all the bills to constitute 110 musicians into the Indian Symphony Orchestra. They made their debut in the quadrangle of St. Xaviers College in South Bombay.

The photographs from that day are extremely impressive, but also heart-breaking when seen in hindsight. 110 beautifully dressed Indian musicians playing symphonic music with tremendous gusto, with an impossibly young-looking Lata Mangueshkar and Manna Dey singing along with great intensity. Standing majestically atop his lectern, baton in action, Gonsalves is poised and leonine. He looks very very happy.

But right there is where the story ends, and a giant door was slammed on the future of symphonic music in India. Idiotic nationalistic paranoia held that Goan musicians like Gonsalves were suspect because they had “foreign names” and played “foreign music.” Walt Disney came calling for this brilliant composer and asked him to score a movie for them with Indian governmental involvement. But ministerial clearance never came: the I&B minister told the shocked young Goan point-blank, “Christian musicians cannot represent India.”

Anthony Gonsalves was crushed, and bewildered by this questioning of his Indianness. He disbanded his orchestra, and went abroad for a lost decade before returning to retirement in total isolation in a Goan village by the sea. His unique raga-based symphonies have never been performed again, and the musicians in his orchestra scattered into obscurity. One day, his symphonies are certain to be rediscovered, championed as great pioneering works, and played in India, perhaps even by Bisengaliev and his crew of Kazakhs and other nationalities in the SOI.

**

It was a combination of historical ignorance, juvenile vindictiveness and cultural insecurity that killed off Anthony Gonsalves’s brave attempt to root symphonies in the Indian musical lexicon, and the same forced conspired to exert the absurd blanket ban on all imports of western musical instruments that held sway for a sold 40 years, before being relaxed in 1995. “The import restrictions severely hampered the growth of music in this country,” says Christopher Gomes, the managing partner of Furtado’s Music, which has remained in the vanguard of music education in India since 1865, and is by far the largest distributor of imported instruments in the country, with 15 showrooms and outlets from Mangalore to Nagaland.

“Demand for the music never went away. There were always many students who wanted to play the piano or violin,” Gomes says, “but there simply weren’t enough instruments remaining after 1947 to allow the music to spread naturally Since the rules began tio change in 1995, he says the demand has rapidly accelerated with each passing year, “liberalization has meant that supply can start to catch up to demand, and now it’s obvious that this music has a very bright future in India.”

Just a few days before the SOI performed in Moscow, Furtado’s joined with the NCPA to organize the John Gomes Memorial All India Piano Competition (named after his father) which was judged by two eminent international pianists, the Canadian Paul Stewart and the Vienna-based Goan, Marialena Fernandes. Gomes says “Paul and Marialena were both really impressed by the young talent that’s now beginning to come out of India. It’s significantly better than just a few years ago. Now we’re seeing that young people envision their future in music. It’s only going to get better from here. My company is going to support these positive developments in every way that we can.”

Like Marialena Fernandes, the London-based soprano Patricia Rozario is another Bombay-born musical prodigy with Goan roots. Rozario persevered to study western classical music in the difficult days of the instrument ban, and eventually made her way to the Guildhall School of Music where she excelled, winning a Gold medal and many other prizes. She’s now established as one of the leading operatic singers in the UK, with a unique style (she often wears a sari on stage) that has inspired a host of the best contemporary composers to write works especially for her. With Sir John Tavener, it has become a unique collaboration - he has written more than thirty pieces of music exclusively for Rozario to bring to life.

In 2009, Rozario decided to nourish her roots. Along with her husband, the pianist Mark Troop, she toured Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Goa to identify young singers with potential. Rozario spent days in auditions, listening to scores of singers, and picked out those who could benefit from her mentoring, and perhaps make it to an international standard. She agrees that “there is a great deal of promising talent in India now. And there is also much more interest in this kind of music, which can only grow with exposure.” Rozario she promises to return each year to continue training singers, and has also promised to help them seek training abroad when merited.

**

Across the subcontinent, in the hillside cities and towns of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, there’s another hotbed of vocal talent that’s quietly developing to critical mass, and making the classical music world sit up and pay attention. Like Goa, the roots of this movement can be traced back to the church.

The North-East’s tryst with Christianity tracks back to the rainy June day that the paradoxical figure of Thomas Jones walked into Cherrapunjee, and immediately set Khasi history on its ear. A carpenter’s son from Wales, Jones was an avowed evangelist, but didn’t actually convert a single person while he was in India, and was eventually kicked out of his own church for conduct “derogatory to the character and calling of a missionary.” Yet, on the 150th anniversary of his death (in 1991), more than 250,000 Khasi Presbyterians gathered to celebrate his life. Meanwhile his “mother church” back in Wales boasted less than 5000 adherents in the whole country.

Thomas Jones distinguished himself – and aggravated colonial authorities– by tirelessly dedicating himself to the material improvement of the Khasis. He taught them modern carpentry. He taught them accounting. He taught them how to compute their almanac to the seven-day week. Above all, Jones learned the unwritten Khasi language and transcribed it into Roman script (with Welsh orthography!) All the tribes of the North –East believe Jones saved the Khasi language – and culture - from certain extinction. And so they repaid the Welshman by joining his church in droves. The next 100 years saw the Khasis, Garos, the Mizos and Nagas turn to Christianity in a huge wave, and right alongside the religion came the music.

The biggest city of the North East, Shillong has been called “India’s rock capital” for many years, and famously comes to a near-standstill every 24th of May when the local legend, and Khasi icon, Lou Majaw celebrates Bob Dylan’s birthday. But the choral tradition of the city is still virtually unknown, even though the Shillong Chamber Choir has toured all over the world, and won a series of prestigious awards. Right alongside Neil Nongkynrih’s sophisticated ensemble are literally thousands of other wonderful singers all across the region who have gone unrecognized up to now. All across the North-East, there are now serious choirs, which feature incredible singers with world-class talent. With a little recognition and support, the future could be limitlessly bright.

Earlier this year, the whole region saw what could lie ahead when the young Naga singer, Sentirenla Lucia Panicker was awarded the highest grade of her graduating class at the Berklee College of Music, the finest institution of its kind in the USA, and brought the audience at her graduation to its feet with a soul-stirring vocal performance. She intends on returning to Nagaland, to pass on what she’s learned to another generation. Without the kind of interference and meddling that destroyed the best hopes of generations that came before her, it is young musicians with her kind of drive who signify a hopeful future for serious music in India, and allow us to dream of a day when the Symphony Orchestra of India actually has more than a handful of Indians in it. (ENDS)


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An edited version of this article was published in the July 2010
edition of the Himal Magazine
http://www.himalmag.com/Indigenous-symphonies_nw4600.html

Through the Looking Glass: Art Appreciation 101

Through the Looking Glass
Art Appreciation 101

Margaret Mascarenhas

I’m filling in for abstract artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal who is on leave this month, with a subject she and I have been discussing for some time: what differentiates good art from bad art? What is the criteria? Who decides?

In 1995, Keio University professor Shigeru Watanabe, and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to distinguish between Picasso paintings and Monets – a study that earned him a Nobel prize. More recently, he trained pigeons in art appreciation, teaching them to differentiate between 'good' paintings and 'bad' paintings, using colour, texture and pattern cues to predefine an aesthetic set of values. In the study, watercolour and pastel paintings by children were first categorised by a panel as either 'good' or 'bad'. The pigeons were put into a holding area where they could view a computer monitor displaying the images, and taught to recognise pre-selected 'good' art through food rewards. Recognising 'bad' art was not rewarded. The birds were then shown a combination of new and old, 'good' and 'bad' painting images. According to Watanabe, “The results suggest that the pigeons used both colour and pattern cues for the discrimination and show that non-human animals, such as pigeons, can be trained to discriminate abstract visual stimuli, such as pictures and may also have the ability to learn the concept of ‘beauty’ as defined by humans.”

The idea that your children could be learning art appreciation from pigeons is surely a disturbing one, but these next stories turn the whole raison d’etre of art criticism on its head.

In 2005, the following news item appeared in The Australian:

“MORITZBURG, Saxony: A German art expert was fooled into believing a painting done by a chimpanzee was the work of a master. The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. ‘It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour,’ Dr Schneider confidently asserted.”

It turns out the painting was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo. But this wasn’t the first time the hallowed practitioners of art criticism were comically exposed as emperors with no clothes. The most notorious case occurred in 1964 when Ake Axelsson, a Swedish newspaperman from the Göteborgs-Tidningen, installed several paintings at the Gallerie Christinae, claiming they were the oeuvre of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. Almost immediately the work began to draw critical attention. Critic Rolf Anderberg wrote this eulogy: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." (Time.com) Pierre Brassau turned out to be a four-year-old chimp named Peter from the local zoo.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes and laugh hysterically.

Toward the end of his life Picasso was putting his name on ashtrays, a number of which were proudly collected by Richard Attenborough. But is it art?

The infamously subversive Marcel Duchamp, as Kotwal wrote in a previous column, initiated the use of “ready-mades” in his art installations, the best known of which was a prank submission of a urinal called “Fountain,” under the pseudonym R Mutt. In response to this article and the pictorial depiction of “Fountain”, one horrified reader heatedly objected to the publishing of such an image, deeming it inappropriate for family viewing. Though this image is one of the most well-known in modern art, and though the traumatised reader entirely missed the point of the article, which was to draw attention to the bizarre arbitrariness of critics who would define such work as “art”, his visceral response to the visual representation exemplifies my own contention: that occasionally the ordinary viewer, without benefit of an education in art history or aesthetics, can be the more reliable critic. (Though I will not endorse the notion that the right to critique includes the right to suppress, as we have seen in the case of MF Husain)

What is art? And what is the role of an art critic?

I was taught, and still am inclined to generally accept the view, that fine art (like literature) is essentially a deliberate arrangement of elements in ways that affect emotions, senses, perspectives, in ways that provide a new insight and/or experience, and in ways that transcend the limitations of the chosen medium and strike a universal chord. To elaborate, I would say that for something to be called art (or literature), it should have goals besides pure self-expression, and should do at least one, but preferably some or all, of the following through the use of skills and ability in handling the building blocks :

• communicate ideas

• explore the nature of perception

• generate strong emotion

• stimulate insight

• possess an aesthetic value

• possess a cognitive value

• facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding of something

What then to make of Damien Hirst? Perhaps the most recognised bad-boy in the global artist community, his celebrity is entirely dependent, not on any traditionally recognised set of manual or even intellectual skills, but on his capacity to generate shocking and provocative concepts—concepts, which are in fact executed by a swarm of employed artisans, a practice now being employed by a number of our own home-grown artists of repute. Add to that the blurring of the line between artist, curator, gallery owner, collector, auction house, and critic, and the nexus between all, some of whom play two or three of these roles simultaneously and quite actively.

Confused?

If we define the role of art criticism as defining a rationale for art appreciation, making art accessible, and highlighting emerging talent, this blurring of the line can be dangerous, in a way that undermines artists, corrupts the creative process, and hoodwinks the public. It is not a secret that international elite coteries comprised of established artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, auctioneers, and critics exist, whose primary objective has less to do with aesthetics or the discovery of emerging talent and its nurturing, and more to do with helping each other to stay on top of a frighteningly recessive market. In such a market turf war it is no wonder so many nay-sayers and newcomers are either summarily ignored or beaten back with sticks.

Of course, there is nothing new about art becoming the cultural capital of the wealthy, both as status symbol and commodity. And to be fair, most art education programmes and private museums are gifts to the public domain by the super-rich. Traditionally artists have required the patronage of the elite in order to work, which of course has generally been subject to certain biases, tastes and preferences of whomever is paying. But lately patronage by the big names in the international art world has assumed a circling shark quality. A number of shark observers have applauded New York-based Tino Sehgal’s successful manoeuvre to take the “ownership” of art away from the purchaser, by creating performance artworks that can be sold at phenomenal prices but leave nothing behind, not even a receipt, as a veritable coup d’etat. But though he has managed to raise his personal bank balance in an ingenious way, he hasn’t exactly contributed in any way to the democratization of art, the mantra of the street artist.

Closer to home, an especially depressing development for the emerging artist and ordinary viewer alike is the burgeoning of facile “art” critics with neither the credentials or the appropriate analytic ability, much less the honesty to actually “critique”, in the Indian press. In one of his recent blogs, Abhay Maskara, collector and owner of an up-and-coming gallery in Mumbai, ridicules in particular the latest propensity for listing “top artists” in the media. He says, and I agree with him:

“The real danger of these prophecies is that the reading public is left with too many ‘invisible gaps’ to fill and s/he is never really sure of why the artists selected actually deserve a place on some infamous list that has been thrust in their face.(sic) I think ‘list-makers’ have a certain kind of responsibility to articulate more clearly the criteria (as loose as it may be) that informs any such selection… Throwing a list of names together and seasoning it with one example each from a variety of sub-categories such as ‘modern artists’, ‘contemporary artists’, ‘women artists’, ‘diasporic artists’, ‘video-artist’, ‘performance artist’. ‘curator-artists’ may be convenient but it is certainly not convincing. Even if one were to condone the generation of such lists and look for parallel examples from the world of music or cinema, we will see that even a ‘greatest hits’ chartbuster or a box office generated ‘top films’ blockbusters is based on some logic that is not gravity defying.”

We shouldn’t actually rely on the event pages of the daily news for informing ourselves about art. And newsmedia that truly want to inform the reading public, as opposed to merely titillate, should hire art writers who actually know what they are talking about, or at the very least are prepared to do their homework. As for the general public, unless buying exclusively for investment purposes, I would say, take a class, visit galleries, read art books and art magazines, and even top ten lists, if you so choose. But when you buy, always choose an artwork that moves you, even if you’ve never heard of the artist before.  (ENDS)

=================================
First published in Goa Today, Goa - April 2010

Book Review: Another Goa

Review of Another Goa
By Simran "Judi" Silva

He shows us the positives but is not blind to the negative aspects, and shares those with us also. One comes to understand the effects of four hundred and fifty-one years of Portuguese colonial rule and what takes place afterward, as he journals with preciseness in describing Goa both in the past and the present.

It covers very specific and serious issues that affect Goa and how those issues shape the thinking of her children - the struggles of everyday life for them. Goa is very diverse, and with this diversity comes complexity. The multifaceted situations that the residents of such a beautiful land encounter need addressing and solutions attained. However, to do so, the people of Goa must band together in a united front in order to take each issue head on and work to come to decisions that all can agree with, since these decisions will affect all of them.

The questions are posed. Will the people of Goa be able to answer them resoundingly? Can they achieve a measure of success in not only preserving their homeland but also in moving forward and improving upon it? If so, it will certainly add to the betterment for not only its inhabitants but for the thousands of tourists who come to visit each year, bringing in revenue to use for further developments.

Looking through the eyes of several expatriates of Goa and what leaving and coming back meant to them, is a very enjoyable part of Another Goa to experience. Reading about Goa opened my eyes to all that she has been through, continues to go through, but also what she has to offer, and I hope to come to experience this for myself one day soon.

I will leave the summary of Another Goa to the author in his humble way. “These pages are a small effort to share with the reader—specially the reader in Goa — some perspectives which might lend to the debate about Goa. It is a small measure of ‘paying back’ to the region I’ve called home for over four decades, and to a place I have to be grateful to.”  (ENDS)

__________________________________________
First published at India New England - March 19, 2010

StyleSpeak: The Art of Noise

StyleSpeak: The Art of Noise
By Wendell Rodricks

It is easy to contemplate on noise here in Grenada. We arrived last night after a seventy hour journey, passing Abu Dhabi in transit for four hours and a freezing New York for ten hours. When we left New York, the runway at JFK airport was covered in a film of snow. It was still flurrying down when the plane took off. Though it was past ten at night when we landed in Grenada (Say Gren-Ay-da not the Gren-aa-da in Spain), what immediately struck me was the sound of the waves. In the silence, that is all we heard.

It reminded me of the Goa I knew. The wonder of silence. The sound of silence. That space of almost God like presence; when there is no sound. Just the sounds created BY God. Birdsong, the wind, the seabreeze, the rustling of the leaves, the sounds of animals (human included) and the waves crashing against the coast. When I moved to Goa in 1993, one night, my then tailor Tauqir appeared in the moonlight in my room; a knife in hand. I was terrified. He was even more so. "Boss", he whispered, "there is a lion breathing in my room". In any other room, we might have laughed. But this was THAT room. When I was buying the house, everyone said it was haunted (as any large home in Goa is supposedly). And in 'that' room, Mr. Braganza had passed away (As if people don't pass away in every room? I had countered at the time). We climbed in deathly silence to the room above. Right enough, from outside the Southern window, there was growl and a hum. Like an animal breathing. It rose on a growling rush and ended on a whoosh. We were mortified. I could hear it very distinctly. We went to the garden with torchlights. Nothing!

Back in the room, the sound was still very audible. I offered to sleep on the floor. Tauqir offered instead to sleep on my room floor downstairs.

Each night, we would go upstairs to hear the 'animal' breathing. It did not disappoint. At about eleven, it would begin. By daylight, it stopped.

A monsoon passed. Late next summer, my father and I went to see his friend the art collector, Max Sequeira. After two fenis, I was astounded to hear the 'animal' again.

"Stop!" I hushed their chatter. "Can you hear that?"

"What?"

"The animal", I whispered. It was clearly audible.

My Dad held his feni in mid-air. "This is the sound you were talking about? The sound you made me hear in your house?"

"Yes!". I was hoarse with shock. The animal had followed us here.

Max let out a loud guffaw and was still laughing at our animal ghost story.

Then he sobered up.

"You know what that is Wendell? The rains are coming. It's the end of May. That sound. That sound you can hear so clearly...It's the waves crashing at Chapora!"

All these years later, on some nights, I go to the Camurlim, with a sad nostalgia, a heavy sausades. There, up on the Camurlim hills, in the last week of May, I hear the waves again. Crashing on the Chapora hills; over ten kilometres away.

Colvale has become too noisy. Factories crank up their generators. The highway makes our old home tremble. The poor walls vibrate their centuries old stones and the plaster flakes off at times when a particularly heavy truck passes by.

On Sundays, we have to bear the church with it's loud speakers. And the temples with theirs in the evenings. And my annoying neighbours "reversing" car sounds.

This is not the Goa we knew. The Goa which was so silent that everyone knew everyone's life. After I pulled up a staff for a certain misdeed, my neighbour would tell me the next day "You made a mistake. He took not just the coconuts away to be sold. He also overcharged your bill at the nako. And that part when you told him to keep the light on all night. That is not right. A waste of electricity". Then she would continue "Arrey, and you know 'that' woman opposite me. Now she has started entertaining the truck drivers as well. Shameless ! And what price they are paying for drinks so late in the night? Sheesh!! Are they mad-o-what?. So expensive." The very thought that illegal bootlegging past midnight is no more taboo is a shock. And the fact that the rate has been overheard is too much to be true. As shocking as it sounds, it IS true!! As Goans say..." Ask anyone in the village? All peoples know!"

Late one night recently I was returning from Arambol. There was a rave (?) on at Mandrem. The noise was so loud, it altered my heartbeat. It was not a rave. Russians were at a shack; some dancing on a floor built in the sand. Is this legal? There were young Russian girls being ferried in the late of the night to prospective clients. Nearby Goan boys on bikes waited to take revellers home.

What has become to our Goa ?

Where is the Police?

Where are our politicians?

"Arrey baba, this is going on because of them. They get money. These Russians give them money. And girls also. Our children cannot study. Our old people cannot sleep despite being deaf. The vibration hits their hearts."

This is terrible!

This is what is going to drive away good tourists.

Better to question: "Is this the quality of tourist we want?".

These high-on-substance rave monsters?

While Kerala enjoys the cream, while Humpi gets the adventurer, while Rajasthan gets the local dance and music types, while Mumbai dines at Indigo... This is what we have reduced our Goa tourism to.

Noise pollution ..... Uncontrolled. Unleashed on a land known twenty years ago for the sound of silence.

We must stop it!

A collective WE.

ME included. If they pass a law not to play music on loudspeakers at ANY time, we must comply. Day or night. NO sound beyond a certain decibel. WE want to hear music. Real music. Not this tourist rave crap. Which keeps us awake, keeps our children from studies, keep our elderly hearts beating faster.

IT MUST STOP!

It is so easy to stop. It's not as there is no solution. The people and the Police and the Government should have the will to stop it. Put a law in place and then act on defaulters. And throw out the bad tourists who control us mafia style. Throw them out for good.

And make Ministers accountable. Their own families are the ones who endorse these evils. They need to go behind bars. If David from Tito’s can be coerced into fitting out a soundproof dance room, why can't others follow suite? Or is that because there is no Police from Siolim to Arambol, that the new beaches steal tourist away from the Calangute Baga belt? This after disco owners have taken precautions over sound in the Baga stretch. Is it fair that they loose their clients to the new unpatrolled beaches?

At the village nako, I can hear conversations. In a city bar, I overheard youth contemplating their future careers.

Instead of a good job. An honest job via studies and hard work... this is what they want. "Hey listen man, you have it already. We want it now. If someone gives me drugs to sell, a few Russian girls to control, an old aunty's house to sell...I'm cool. I make two to five thousand a day. Then I take a bit of coke myself on the side, do a few of the girls who I drive around. It's easy."

I see the point. But I don't get it !!

What they are saying is...Why get a degree and end up as a clerk? Why not this easy way?

Even the parents of such kids gloat ..."My baba Shaanu no... he goes Calangute. Works very hard. But gets good money. Last month gave me car. Next month we are making new house."

Obviously her prayers are answered. This clueless-to-what-her-Shaanu-does Goan lady. At Mass she prays even more fervently.

I think we need to all go down on our knees.

And pray for this noise to stop. For Satan to leave our shores. To make us realise the Goa we are loosing. To hear the birds again. To hear the waves at Chapora... in Colvale. To hear our conscience. To slumber in the fact that we can have less money but retain our dignity, sanity, uncorruption and integrity.

So that finally we can hear the true voice of God ! (ENDS)

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First published in Goa Today, Goa - March 2010

My city is better than yours: Panjim

My city is better than yours

Vivek Menezes on Panjim

The hidden secret behind Panjim’s catalogue of charms is that it is a new city that has been created with the advantage of planning. Unlike almost every other important urban entity in India, this riverside capital city of the country’s smallest state was rigorously conceived, planned and built in a spate of energy that sustained itself all through the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth.

Previously, the site of the present city had been an outlying, swamp-ridden ward of the village of Taleigao near the confluence of the Mandovi and the Zuari rivers. So it slumbered while magnificent port-cities came into being further upriver, and still slept on when they crumbled back into red laterite mud.

The last of these cities upriver was the original capital city of the Portuguese, which shot to global prominence in the sixteenth century and was larger and much richer than Paris or London of the time. But plagues sapped Old Goa, and the native elites (both Hindu and converted Catholic) wanted the seat of power to be shifted away from under the nose of the religious orders controlling the capital. These elites found support in the anti-religious prime minister of Portugal in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Marquis de Pombal. So little Panjim became the de facto capital of Goa even before it was officially declared a city, which only happened many decades later. That curiously outsized, in-between state of being persists, with Panjim continuing to wield disproportionate clout despite its minuscule proportions. Its population is just about 60,000, far less even than Goan cities like Vasco and Margao. But everything important seems to take place in Panjim nonetheless.

The city remains astonishingly pocket-sized even compared to Goan villages. You can stroll its entire length in less than an hour. A most un-urban everyone-knows-everyone culture still reigns across the city’s neighbourhoods, where a good proportion of the houses are still occupied by the families that built them a century ago.

Though the distinctive architecture of Panjim is routinely called “Portuguese”, there are no buildings remotely like these in Portugal. Instead, the aesthetic here is Indo-Iberian, a self-confident Latinate variant, a native means of cultural assertion and pride. The story of Panjim is also the story of the assimilative, ceaselessly adaptive triumph of the Goans coming into their own within the colonialist entity – they took what they needed from their contacts with the greater world, and then shaped a unique space that is all their own.

I feel the difference every day, especially when I make my daily visit to Farm Products on Azad Maidan right in the heart of Panjim, where there are only three seats. One might be occupied by a bishop, and another by a rag-picker, but all of us will gobble delicious egg chops while conversing with the genial proprietor, the 84-year-old Alvaro Pereira, whose courtly manner doesn’t betray the years he spent being sadistically tortured in a colonial jail for the crime of refusing to take off his Gandhi topi, nor his heroics after the Liberation of Goa where he stopped a lynch-mob from attacking the same policemen who had tormented him in jail.

Quite often we are joined by other freedom-fighters from those heady years of struggle that finally ended 450 years of colonialism. I listen to them switch effortlessly from liquid Portuguese to animated Konkani and back again while I sip my strong coffee, these men of principle no more pleased with the current leadership than they were 50 years ago. The cup drains, time stands still. Panjim endures, its original charms intact for another era.   (ENDS)

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First published in Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 15, February 05, 2010

The Accidental Activist - How to start a protest – Part II

The Accidental Activist - How to start a protest – Part II
By Venita Coelho

There are only two things that politicians take heed of. One is bad press, the other are crowds. When you have an issue that needs action you need to work out two strategies simultaneously. One to get lots of press attention. The other to build critical mass. It is not enough to have one press conference – you need to network with the press, make them see your point of view, co-ordinate so that a series of follow up articles keeps the matter alive. If you can manage to get into the national press then you will really get our netas to sit up and take notice. Dedicate one person who is articulate and persistent to be your press liason. Her number will have to be on day and night. Get the simple things correct – press releases in both English and Konkani, always sent out to the right contact person, before 4:00 p.m. if you want them carried the next day.Make a special effort to get coverage from the non English dailies. These are what the majority of Goa reads.

To keep the issue on the boil you need a series of ‘breaks’. It is well worth holding back dynamic information and releasing it in bits so that the story stays alive. Get known faces to speak up on your behalf. Any celebrities from your area? Get them to pitch in and do their bit. All is fair when you are fighting for column space.

As your issue begins to get press coverage, start planning how to mobilize more support. First look for support near to home – associations in the nearby villages, other action committees and consumer groups. Make sure you network with other activists and Goa wide groups. You will get the benefit of both numbers and their experience.

An important weapon is a public rally.But NEVER decide to call a morcha unless you are sure of the numbers. And numbers in Goa are extremely difficult to get. If you call a public protest and end up with a couple of hundred people,that is the end of officialdom taking you seriously. If you manage to gather a couple of thousand they will sit up. And if, like a recent protest, you manage to get five thousand people on the road and shut down all of Panjim, you can be sure your demands will be met. But this will not happen unless you network with other NGO’s in the field, have a dedicated bank of volunteers drumming up support, and provide money for buses to truck people in from elsewhere. Launching a public protest can be a huge logistic exercise. Far better to innovate and come up with methods of protest that leverage minimum effort with maximum mileage. Who says you can’t get creative with protesting? The Protest by Picnic organized by GBA on Vainguinim beach was one of the most delightful ways to protestthought up in a long time. The Cidade had been treating the beach as private property for far too long. To reclaim it as public space, GBA threw a picnic and everyone was invited!

Forget the tried and tested route of flexing muscles at large rallies. Go in for something crazier- that the establishment will also have no idea how to tackle, and which will grab you lots of press.

Meanwhile the real slog will go on. Make sure you have a dedicated band that is following up onRTI applications and other government permissions.I always thought that speaking directly to those responsible for handing out permissions was a waste of time. But I was proved wrong. Visit the Chief Town Planner often enough, and with press in tow, and he will eventually have to take action of some sort. Support will come from unexpected places within the government. In one case the Forest department chose to take umbrage that a powerful builder had cut trees without their permission. They ordered an Inspection and a subsequentStop Work notice. So don’t ignore this route. Meet those on the official side. Sometimesinstead of a stuffed government shirt you will encounter a human being who is genuinely trying to do his job. It always leaves me hopeful.

By now the individual back lash will have started. You can expect notices from the panchayat, cases filed against you at the police station and stones thrown at your house at night. These are all tactics of intimidation, and it amazes me how little it takes to scare people. A couple of stones rattle against the roof and suddenly all the supporters vanish. You’re there to fight, correct? Then fight. Go and register counter cases at the police station. Hire a damn good lawyer. Take them on head on. It always neutralizes them. One activist who got a demolition notice for a perfectly legal garage merely shrugged and said‘ Okay I’ll demolish my garage even though it is legal – so now what are you going to do?’ That left them stumped. It is important to make them realise that you are not a pushover who will run at the first sign of trouble.Let them know that you are a yodha and this is going to be a real battle. Make sure you keep the press in the loop. Press coverage is good protection.

Sounding more complex than you bargained for? The most important things in life are always got at a high cost. But the cost of not fighting for them is even higher.You got started because you were angry. Keep the anger going. Keep the fight going. (continues)

Part I of this article can be found at:

http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2010-January/188157.html

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First published in the Herald, Goa - January 12, 2010

Art Exhibition: Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal

This short essay was written to commemorate the opening of Amchem Sobit Daiz, an exhibition of artworks dedicated to her forefathers by Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal.

Amchem Sobit Daiz is among the most significant art exhibitions ever to take place in Goa. With this historic suite of artworks, drawn deep from the wellsprings of our culture, Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal makes a compelling case to be ranked alongside the very greatest of our artists. These soulful, joyous images of Goa belong with the best work by Laxman Pai, Francis Newton Souza, Angelo Fonseca and other Goans who have constituted what Ranjit Hoskote has called “an invisible river”, enlivening and influencing the trajectory of Indian art for more than a century.

Born in 1968, Sonia belongs to the last generation of artists that came of age when it was nearly impossible for any young Indian to conceive of making a living from art, the entire subcontinent was home to less a handful of decent galleries, and there was very little interest in contemporary art. As a result of these conditions, Sonia’s is a generation of artists that is distinguished by the trait of persistence – they believed in their work when no one else was there to support it, they laboured in critical and curatorial isolation and struggled to find sales.

All this is particularly true for Sonia and her peers among the young artists of Goa, about whom Hoskote has said “the lack of a context has left them afloat in a void of discussion.” It is a vexing situation that has now persisted for generations. Goa keeps producing some of the best and most promising artists in the country but very few ever receive substantial commercial or critical rewards. Here, we need to acknowledge the ongoing failure of the critical establishment in India to understand the nature of the differences in Goa’s history which have set it apart for centuries, even while it simultaneously fed and shaped the modern cultural expression of India via a long series of pathbreaking individuals.

No Goan can ignore the multiple religious and cultural identities that compete, dialogue and mingle in her own self, and all around us. Fonseca’s sari-clad Madonnas come from this aspect of our character, as also Souza’s chalices embossed with tantric symbology. But it is precisely this profound cultural fluidity that continues to confound the canon-makers of India – Goan art undeniably has a different DNA that distinguishes it, and falls outside their pet narratives.

Unfortunately, the standard response to this difference, in the rare cases when it has been acknowledged, is to treat it as a deeply inconvenient truth. The disrespect has become a chronic condition, an institution in itself. It extends to an absurd refusal to acknowledge that something called 'Goan Art' even exists, a denial that is particularly galling when it is issued right here in Goa.

Because of all these reasons, Amchem Sobit Daiz is more than just a landmark show for Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal. It is evident that she has entered a new and mature period of her career, and that she must now be reckoned with as a major force in the cultural expression of the Goans. Her best artwork is in this suite derived from Goan culture, and Sonia's loving, perceptive soul is mirrored in each painting. But this show is also a powerful testimonial to the finest and highest traditions of what is undeniably Goan art. Taken together, these marvellous artworks make a case which cannot be ignored. In the completeness and self-confidence of these paintings and drawings, in the ambition, scale and execution of this marvellous show in a gallery as fine as in any Indian metropolis, Amchem Sobit Daiz represents a paradigm shift for the art and artists of Goa.

For this immeasurably valuable gift, conceived and presented in the timeless bhakti traditions of Goan this land, I offer my sincere gratitude, and heartiest personal congratulations to Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal.


Mog Asun Di.

Vivek Menezes


Brochure:
http://tinyurl.com/Sonia-brochure


Amchem Sobit Daiz
an historic suite of paintings
dedicated to our Goan forefathers

An exhibition by Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal

The Exhibition will be open from 11th to 23rd January 2010 between 10.30am and 7pm

Ruchika's Art Gallery
Casa del Sol, Opposite Marriott
Miramar, Panaji, Goa
www.ruchikasart.com

The Accidental Activist - How to start a protest – Part I

The Accidental Activist - How to start a protest – Part I
By Venita Coelho


First you have to be very angry. Indignation won’t do. Any battle worth fighting takes a long time and your anger will have to simmer through months and maybe years. It will have to sustain you when family try to talk you out of it, neighbours quit talking to you and the panchayat sends you notices for trumped up violations. Really hopping mad? Willing to put yourself on the line? Here’s some simple advice on how you can get going.

The next step is to get the facts. You want to stop that mega project in its tracks? The public protests won’t do it, though they are vital for bringing the issue into the public eye. What will do it is some small little overlooked permission, or fact that will turn up when you get all the documents under RTI. Get someone else to file for the documents under RTI. Why set up alerts before necessary? Further, filing legal objections is often a time bound activity, counting from the day you actually got the facts in your hands.

Getting the facts out of various authorities under RTI is a complicated exercise. If there is the slightest ambiguity in the wording of your request, they will promptly send you the wrong papers, deny they have them, or Xerox every paper in the building, except the one that you want, and hand you the bill. But the key to winning the battle is right here. No facts. No case.

Take your facts to the experts. Go straight to the people who are already fighting on the ground, and use legal counsel that has already proved itself as unbuyable. Remember that crores are at stake and in Goa unfortunately, almost everyone and everything is up for sale.

If you are going to fight a long hard battle, you need an army. First mobilize all those who are going to be affected by what you are protesting. Start with your village. A good way is to do a simple flyer ( in English and Konkani). Rope in some youngsters to deliver it doorstep to doorstep – always on a Sunday. Then hold corner meetings at the various vaddos, explaining the facts. Follow up the flyer with an awareness meeting.

You need a name, a working base and a face before you go public – launch an Action Committee. Never ignore the existing clubs/committees/consumer forums etc in your area. Speak personally to every single one and get their support. If you leave them out, you can be garunteed an outbreak of politics the minute the issue hits the headlines. Get a spokesperson who can speak both English and Konkani fluently. Make sure he/she knows the facts backwards. Get two convenors in case one is ever out of town, or compromised. Make sure you have at least four people who will not buckle no matter what the pressure. One of these better be a good organizer, quick with to do lists, and inexorable with follow up. Take a little internal donation so that you have some working capital.

Tackle the Panchayat. Make sure you are clear about the Panchayats role having got all the correspondence from the files. Confront them in writing. Documentation of every step is the key here. When it all ends up in court you will be grateful for every single scrap of paper that you have that traces the process. Get them to commit on paper the permissions they did or did not give. Don’t expect much. Projects worth crores, or violations that make money for people in high places, aren’t ever innocently passed by the panchayat. If you can get a couple of panchayat members on your side that is a bonanza.

At your awareness meeting you can expect your first reprisal. Along with curious villagers, there will be spies in attendance, and, possibly, rowdies paid to disrupt the event. Be ready to have a timely powercut disrupt the proceedings. Make sure you have informed the police in writing of the meeting and the loudspeaker permission is in place. Pulling the plug on you is a simple matter for the authorities if you haven’t already covered every single base.

Pull every favour to ensure that some press is present. This will protect you.

Make sure you have some heavy duty names speaking. Get respected activists who bring their moral authority to the issue that you are tackling. Go and meet each of them personally with the facts be. Don’t be afraid. They have spent years trying to save Goa. They always welcome one more fighter to the fold. Make sure the awareness meeting alerts the villagers on how the issue will affect each of them personally. Will it ruin their water supply? Change the population of the village so they are outnumbered? Dump sewage into their fields? People respond to personal threat. (continues)

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First published in the Herald, Goa - January 5, 2010

Goanet Highlights (Jan 4, 2010)

Goanet Highlights (Jan 4, 2010)
By Selma Carvalho

There is an old Greek myth that when the Goddess Demeter had her daughter, Persephone, abducted by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, Demeter travelled to Hell itself to get her daughter back. No parent should ever have to bury their own child and no words can take away the pain the death of a child can bring. Dr Francisco Colaco has channeled his grief into a song and in sharing his grief he has given us Goans a timeless moment of pure artistic magic. Click here for the song. Read more...

Nandkumar Kamat shares his concerns about Goa’s disappearing fireflies, a sure sign that we are steadily upsetting Goa’s ecological balance and destroying its biodiversity. Read more...

Selma Carvalho takes a snapshot of Goa 2009 in her weekly column. Read more...

A collection of Alexyz cartoons that were published in local Goan newspapers in 2009. Read more...

A topic this week which gave rise to contradictory views was the release of a controversial CD tape, allegedly defaming a Catholic priest and a Minister. As a result of hurt sensibilities, some villagers in Colva imposed a bandh and attacked the house of the man who had made the CD. This case has very serious repercussions and brings to the fore questions about the role of the police and religious sensibilities in a secular democracy. The right of freedom of speech and expression is sacrosanct in a democracy. Cases of defamation are a civic matter and have to be decided upon by a responsible judge. The role of the police is only to uphold the law and provide protection to victims of violence. It is not to subvert the law according to the whims of a mob. Once again we see an unhealthy nexus between religion, police and polity acting in concert to make a mockery of democracy. Here are some of the views expressed.

Augusto Pinto: Read more...

Venantius Pinto: Read more...

Jesus Fernandes: Read more...

Peter Fernandes: Read more...


Rajan Parrikar provides us a wonderful picture of Ganesha of Khandola, Goa. Read more...

Carmen Miranda, based in London, has taken on the challenge of Goa’s environmental conservation. In an article which appeared on the Herald, she asks Goans “what are we waiting for?” Read more...

Antonia Gomes is about to release his debut novel titled, The Sting of Peppercorns. Doctor Basilio Monteiro writes us a review of the book, set in colonial Goa. Read more...

A poignant poem by H.O Nazareth, titled The Villagers. Read more...

Anthony, or Tony as he was known, de Mello, was one of the most influential personalities of the 1980s and indeed his book, Prayer of the Frog, was my constant companion. In keeping with the rich traditions of Jesuits, De Mello made one think about spirituality at a level which transcends religion. Here is more about this fascinating personality. Read more...

Tomazinho Cardozo writes a short biography of the tiatrist Lucazinho Ribeiro, who perhaps can rightly be called the father of Goan tiatre. Read more...

Lino Dourado brought us his Aitaracheo Katkutleo: Ailem Tum? Read more...

Father Ivo shares his views on abortion. Read more...

Doctor Santosh Helekar gives a rebuttal. Read more...


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FOOTLOOSE: An ode to Colva

An ode to Colva
By Derek Almeida


The brand of Christianity practiced in Colva is not for the meek and the kind. It is for the tough and the ruthless. The chaps who can throw stones and torch gaddas and then go for confession and wipe the slate clean.

So I decided to compose a poem in honour of the Colva Parish Council who recently celebrated Christmas by pelting stones on the residence of their neighbour.

If you happen to be the type
who beats his chest at night and says,
‘Father forgive them for they
know not what they do’
Colva is not the place for you.

Ever heard of the man called Jesus?
He said to turn the other cheek.
I love this law, I love this teaching,
But in Colva they prefer to do the slapping

They are willing to cast the first stone.
They are willing to break the first bone
Just name the chap, point to his place
And they’ll work wonders with his face.

We believe in forgiveness
We know love is strong
But on that Monday afternoon
They did what was wrong

PI Edwin, he is a great dude
He never made a sound, he made them feel good
And when it was time to stone the tiles
Good Edwin was far, far away by miles

Every morning for church they depart,
To receive His grace with humble heart.
And to God in heaven they firmly pray,
To please take Calvert Gonsalves away.

In high respect they hold Diogo father,
And believe not that he met a mother.
For him they will fight and set afire,
That he may enjoy to his heart’s desire.
And what can we say about our CM?
Who carefully ignored all this mayhem
He knows how to close his eyes and avoid the sight,
of Colva parishioners having a fight

Oh church leaders why do you not act?
Are we to believe that there is a pact.
To protect Fr Diogo and the council’s fair name,
And leave the rest of us to hide in shame.

For violence Jesus said, is not a game,
To play and play in his dear name.
Dear church leaders it is no sin
To curb the deadly rot within.

Someday when time has passed us by,
We will look back with cautious eye.
And then, let it not be said
That our dear church leaders, our guiding light
Failed to stand by what was right.

And for Calvert we have something to say,
It would be better if you are kept at bay.
If you want to sing, dance and make merry
Take trip to Antarctica on a one-way ferry.

(ENDS)

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First published in the Gomantak Times (Weekender), Goa - January 3, 2010

StyleSpeak: New Decade Resolutions

StyleSpeak: New Decade Resolutions
By Wendell Rodricks


In the pale light of the new decade, Goans will be delighted if a few resolutions are in place to make our lives and the state of Goa a better place to be. And a safer one too. Talking of safety and security, how about Resolution number One.

It would be music to our ears if the Goa Police pulled up its socks and declared “We will not lie, cover up and mislead the Goan people, the nation and international citizens”. As a fashion designer I am embarrassed to be asked after a fashion show by the media about what I think of the Goa Police covering up a rape, murder or video recording of the cadre having sex with a prostitute. Why should any Goan stand up for an obviously undisciplined police force which needs to be put in order? When television stations were chasing me to go live on the evening news explaining the safety of Goa I had half a mind to say “Yes, Goa is unsafe. Please do not holiday here. Let the decline of Goan tourism begin”. Instead it would be better if the Goa police took a New Years resolution to get their act in order and give us what we pay taxes for: Safety and Security.

In the Russian roulette of ministers, I have forgotten who is in charge of which ministry. But whoever is holding the key to the garbage problem should resign this New Year if he or she cannot resolve the issue. For ten years now, we have been screaming hoarse about garbage and there is no plan in place to handle the miniscule amount of garbage spewed by 1.3 million people. Instead of leading the way to show India how we can “do it”, we have become Exhibit ‘A’ for the garbage problem in the country. It is in our fields, villages, stinking cities, murky rivers and now, quite literally, blowing in the wind we breathe.

We pay taxes for many services that are denied to us. Like electricity and proper roads. Instead of taking up these basic issues, we hear talk of a “sea link” between Dona Paula and Vasco. Can the Chief Minister please resolve not to even think of this money gobbling nightmare? Parrikar has been shamed by the concrete pillars of the so called Sky Train. Please! Let’s forget all this talk of a Sea Link. Take care of our garbage, roads and power first.

The most shameful part of the past decade has been the passing of the dreaded Ordinance to save one private hotel’s ego. While everyone places the blame on the Chief Minister, the truth is that not a single MLA opposed this power playing move. Not only was it a disgrace to the justice and legal administrators of this country, it was a gross abuse of the common man. That the government can condone and over rule the interest of Goan justice in one devastating blow is Goa’s shame.

On the other hand one must give credit to two controversial MLA’s in Goa. Love him or loathe him, but Babush Monseratte’s Taleigao is Goa’s best maintained, most beautiful constituency. Each time, one drives through the wide roads, picket lined, clean, green Taleigao, one must give it to Monseratte for a job well done.

As is Vishwajit Rane. The new medical facilities are worthy of standing alongside the best in the world.

Which goes to prove that when Ministers resolve to deliver, the public do not care whatever payoffs they may enjoy.

Someone at IFFI needs to take a similar resolve this 2010. Make the ESG (Entertainment Society of Goa) a truly democratic authority with no private, vested interests. Put people in place where there is more direction and focus. Each year, I hear criticisms from famous film personalities who bemoan the mess and the waste of a multi crore budget. How can one not have a problem when most people on the ESG have no clue about films? More keen to direct revenue to their own businesses, IFFI should disband the ESG and start afresh. It is only then that we can believe the “as good as Cannes” line we hear each year.

When Shrinivas Dempo sold his mines last year, it sent shockwaves in the mining industry. But Dempo himself is a serene man now; blissfully content and looking ten years younger at the weight of mining lifted off his shoulder. Maybe the CM, the Police and vested Ministers can take a clue from Dempo’s smile and resolve to stop illegal mines and ruining the face of some truly legal mining families in Goa.

It took under a decade for Goa to loose one of its best and most lucrative beach. Candolim beach does not exist any more. All the hotels and homes on that belt should join together and resolve to solve this situation. The dreaded River Princess just has to go. We do not need to take another decade over the matter.

And finally, all of us Goans need to make some resolutions for our beloved Goa. Instead of obsessing about matters as insane as the infidelity of the Tiger Woods, we need to stop becoming spectators of the decay, the mundane, the banal and the macabre. We all need to resolve this 2010 to work for a better Goa In the next decade. A happy, healthy, uncorrupt, safe, garbage free, power uninterrupted, social amenity worthy, progressive Goa this 2010! (ENDS)

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First published in Goa Today - January 2010