HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GOA

by Mario Cabral e Sá

Goa is lucky. It is still young and birthdays are
always beautiful. In the sixteenth birthdays she had
so far, no matter whether plum or sponge, the icing
has always been beautiful, full of many dreams, sweet
dreams. And this year Panaji, the capital city, is
getting dressed to kill; gorgeous lingerie, brilliant
maquillage.

The gutters have been cleaned, the roads resurfaced to
velvet smoothness, the pathways redone, the public
buildings, at long last, spruced up. We are even going
to have a new market with the exteriors painted by a
world renowned artist. It will be a pleasure to shop,
no matter the price.

The great Bakibab Borkar had written in 1946, when Goa
desired no more than the restoration of civil
liberties:
Trivaar Mangalvaar
Aazala Trivaar Mangalvaar
Swatranchi Sinhagarzanar
Aatan Ilhen Uthanar
(An eternally auspicious day
Today is an eternally auspicious day
For the roar of freedom
Now resounds in this land)
Translation: courtesy Prof. Dr.Pratima Kamat, Goa
Redefining Horizons,
Pages 7 and 15.

Were Bakibab still with us, which, alas, he is not,
what might he have written on this, yet another,
statehood day? Would he, perchance, rewrite his poem
to Yama? The last time, he had begged Yama, the God of
Death, to not make it his turn that day. “Not today,
God/there is fish curry tonight”. Would he now beg
again Yama for some more time till he could afford the
fish for his curry?

The internationally respected economist, Dr.A. Pai
Panandikar is on record that by the year 2061, a
century since freedom, “Goa could well attain a per
capita income of over US Dollars 25,000, as against
(the present) USD 700 – 800”. Many of us, certainly
not I, will be around to savour the truth of
Visu-bab’s prophecy. But the thought thrills. At USD
25000, roughly, at the current rate of exchange,
Rs.11.25 crore, my three granddaughters will be able
to feast themselves, at today’s rates of course, on
1,875 kgs of tiger prawns during their annual Goa
holiday. The only likely problem would be that tiger
prawns, or any other consumable, might not remain at
today’s parity.

Happen what may to the dollar or the king prawn, to
Goa Goans will come back, happy as any Goan always has
been to re-discover one’s roots. But so much is
happening in Goa that she looks, every passing day,
less Goan than she was the previous year. Let us not
go into ifs and buts, whys and hows, because, if we
do, we will have to own the guilt. The demographer
says that nearly 40% of Goa’s nearly 1.4 million
population is made up of citizens that have immigrated
into Goa. They are not Martians, I know. Like you and
I they are the product of many Indian incarnations.
Ethnologist Pandurang R. Phaldesai tells us in his
recent doctoral thesis, the product of decades of
love’s labour, that the adivasis of Goa still account
for 30% of the population, but regrets that we are not
doing for them all that we might. What he did not tell
us is that what is happening unto us, not long ago
happened unto them – not really a sort of biblical
tit-for-tat, but the ever repetitive phenomenon of old
order yielding place to new.

However, a large number of Goans seem to be suddenly
waking up to the reality of the impending
degoanization of Goa. And a fairly demonstrative
section of the youth has taken it upon itself to vent
the resentment. They rattled so harshly the targets of
their ire that, at least one of them, and ironically
one who has done much for Goa’s culture, has vowed to
not remain here a day longer than absolutely
necessary. Will Goa revive itself through this kind of
shock therapy? A good question!

But I fear that it might not. Sheer regional
patriotism won’t plug the gaping holes in our social
network. For one, Goans abhor hard work and, sadly,
nature abhors vacuum. There are stones to quarry, and
bricks to lay, houses, bridges and roads to build,
garbage to scavenge. Somebody has to do it. And many
are willing. To make it worse, Goans seem to have
decided that real estate is more attractive than
agriculture. If once we brought potatoes from Holland
and beef from Argentina, we have since discovered that
Hubli and Belgaum are closer at hand. The petty but
shrewd traders of those commodities, on the other
hand, have not been slow in discovering that Goans are
better buyers than sellers. And their tribe is
multiplying.

We revel in suffixing our God-given names with the
abbreviations of all manner of diplomas, degrees and
doctorates, many, if not most, not worth the paper
they are printed on. At the same time, Goa is fast
industrializing itself, much of it state-of-the-art—
but to our horror neither do we have enough of our own
muscular lads willing to stack up crates popping off
from the assembly lines, nor enough egg-heads to
conceptualize sophisticated products. As long as the
situation remains stagnant – and it has for much
longer than is good for our health – the on-going
process of de-Goanization will only get worse.

How do we revert the precipitous slide? Were do we
begin? The brilliant educationist Fr.Romualdo de Sousa
has pointed the way in his writings and in his
interventions at various educational and cultural
interfaces he has participated in, so far, it seems to
no avail. To begin with, “we must learn to unlearn”,
that is discard outdated notions and formats. As he
put it, “If education is an enabling factor for
economic growth, we and our government need to address
some basic questions:-

- is our educational system, at all levels, designed
to prepare the students to productively pursue a
higher standard of life for themselves and for all our
people?

- does it equip its graduates to compete in a
globalized ‘knowledge economy’ in which speed is of
vital importance?”

And he continues, “The answer to these questions will
highlight the necessity of an extremely close
cooperation between government, business and education
for bringing about the changes required to meet the
needs of students, educators, and employers under the
entirely new conditions created by the ‘new economy’
”. If not, our traditional way of life – call it
Asmtai, call it Culture, call it Heritage or what you
will – will be no guide to what the future requires of
us.

Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar has time and again hit
the nail on the head, when pointing out that most of
our shortcomings can be placed at the door of our
educational system. That it needs a radical change. We
shall await it with bated breath.

But let us not loose the sense of perspective. No
doubt much remains to be done, largely because what
had been done was done shoddily. We seem to have
collectively lost sight of the fact that it is always
easier to do it well the first time. To add to our
woes, the two political transitions in the recent
history of Goa took their toll. Wile the integration
of Goa, in 1961, stands out for its careful military
planning, the planning of the other components — the
civil administration — was an un qualified disaster.
The predecessor administration, colonial as it
certainly was, in comparison was far better structured
than the successor administration. It was too suddenly
enforced and was largely patterned on the British
colonial scheme which was — and in many ways remains –
at least two centuries outdated. The second
transition, from a Union Territory to a full-fledged
state of the Union, like the proverbial curate’s egg,
had its flaws. The luxury of parasitism, with a
cent-per-cent subsidized budget, was suddenly replaced
by the need to mobilize resources. For a while, either
because the state was bereft of ideas or, then of
funds, development came to standstill.

On the plus side, Goa ceased to be New Delhi’s
fiefdom, True, Goa had a legislature and a government,
but the legislature could be over-ruled by the Lt.
Governor and government bullied by the personna within
the Lt. Governor’s personna – the Administrator, on
whom vested the ultimate financial powers. He was
represented in the cabinet meetings by his secretary
who sometimes succumbed to the temptation of throwing
his weight around and dominated cabinet discussions
and tailored its decisions — all this by a career
bureaucrat who back home, in Delhi, might have ranked
no higher than an undersecretary. The near colonial
existence was rectified and the people of Goa’s
dignity restored with the achievement of Statehood.

Then, and more anguishingly, statehood and its twin,
the campaign for the state’s official language,
generated dispensible acrimony and badly bruised the
social fabric. It also was to soon generate an
unbridled greed for power. The measure of it is that
Goa had thirteen chief ministers in ten years; in one
particularly bleak year, four of them!

It is therefore, no small consolation that now there
is political stability, a semblance of governance, a
hierarchy that, to all appearances, is undaunted by
political blackmail or the immediate need of appeasing
potential back-stabbers. Of course, the government of
the day may have a philosophy that is neither yours
nor mine. But as long as it is principled and not
predatory, it is well within its rights and the rules
of the game. All its opponents can now do is to hope
that the, next time round, they won’t be let down by
their Messiah.


- Forwarded by Gaspar Almeida who suggests to
view/read: http://goagovt.nic.in/bgoa.htm


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