Contemporary Goa, where rapid commercialization clashes with fading susegad traditions, the voice of comedian Radhika Vaz cuts through with deceptive gentleness. Born in Mumbai to Goan-Catholic parents, Vaz carries forward a distinctly Goan inheritance of satire that does not scream but whispers devastating truths. Her brand of comedy, self-described as “Older. Angrier. Hairier,” employs what can be termed “out-ironying”,...
Out-Ironying Goa: The Quiet Power of Polite Agreement
Goa has never been loud. Its resistance, like its landscape, moves in gentle curves, coconut palms swaying before a storm, a quiet wave that eventually reshapes the shore. In recent years, a particular form of political and cultural pushback has re-emerged in public discourse, one that feels uniquely Goan: out-ironying. Instead of frontal confrontation, it involves agreeing with an...
Zaiat Zage: A Frankfurt School Reading of Manohar Sardesai’s Call to Awakening
Manohar Rai Sardessai’s Zaiat Zage (Arise, Awake), published in 1964, is far more than a collection of Konkani verses from a newly liberated Goa. It is a poetic intervention against resignation, a demand for collective consciousness at the precise historical moment when formal political freedom threatened to freeze into new forms of domination. Viewed through the lens of Frankfurt...
Goa’s Gentle Mirror: Satire for the Unhomed Pobre Fidalgos
While the Mandovi, Zuari , Sal, and other rivers meet the Arabian Sea, Goa finds itself in a curious rerun of history. The old irony returns: Popre Fidalgos, once the titled gentry of Portuguese times, have shape-shifted into modern forms, where many native Goans feel like being exiled in their backyard. This unhoming is not dramatic exile by ship...
The Spectral Imperative Haunting Goans
One can clearly discern that in Goa, a distinct form of political subjectivity is emerging at the intersection of national aspiration and regional memory. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) sustained influence in the state, often through coalitions and pragmatic absorptions, operates not merely through policy or electoral machinery but through a deeper psychopolitical command: the superegoic injunction to enjoy...
Ethical Resistance in an Age of Conformism and Exaggerated Enjoyment
In a world saturated with ready-made identities and scripted pleasures, philosophy begins with a simple yet radical act: disobedience. To philosophize, as Frédéric Gros reminds us, is to refuse the automatic obedience that sustains unjust orders. It is not mere rebellion for its own sake, but an ethical stance, a deliberate reawakening of conscience and judgment against the quiet...
Reconsidering Priolkar’s Legacy
In an era when discussions about Goan history often grow deeply polarized, the sharing of A.K. Priolkar’s 1968 biographical sketch of St. Francis Xavier offers a valuable opportunity for thoughtful reflection. Priolkar, whose earlier book on the Goa Inquisition remains widely referenced, presents in this Mandovi magazine (written in Marathi ) article a portrait of the saint that is...
Who Remembers, Who Forgets: Goan Catholics, the Inquisition, and the Postcolonial Present
In Goa today, two conversations about the past seem to move in opposite directions. Many Goan Catholics live their faith quietly, without daily reference to the Inquisition that ran from 1560 to 1812. At the same time, a section of society speaks publicly, and often with urgency, about ancestral pain from that same period, claiming a continuity of victimhood...
Why the Cross Remembers and the Heart Forgets: The Catholics of Goa
In Goa, the bells of St. Francis Xavier Church in Borim ring for Sunday Mass, for funerals, for feasts. They do not ring for the Inquisition. Yet the Inquisition happened. From 1560 to 1812, tribunals judged faith, punished dissent, and left scars on families who are now dust. Today, most Goan Catholics do not carry that pain in their...
The Age of Hurt: Reading Goa’s Sentiments Through Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger
In recent years, Goa has witnessed a quiet but persistent shift in public mood. Conversations in markets, tea stalls, village clubs, and social media often circle back to one theme: a feeling of being hurt, overlooked, or disrespected. Different communities speak of past wrongs, cultural erosion, economic anxieties, and a fear that their identity is slipping away. The language...
