We are living in an accelerated condition. What does acceleration do to our thinking may be an interesting question that we may ask ourselves. Does acceleration speed up the thinking of the masses? Does it slow it down? We Goans are also experiencing a social acceleration. What it is it doing to us is an important issue that we...
Bringing a Upanisadic Moment in Goa
The historiography of Post-colonial history of Goa appears to be drunk on an anamnestic intoxication of the memory of colonial disruption. It seems to view memory as literally re’membering’, that is, putting together the dismembered past. But is this project of totalising the de-totalized pasts into a framework a of singularized as well as linearized narrative legitimate?Will this anamnestic...
Examined Life For A Livable Goa
‘Unexamined life is not worth living’ said Socrates. He taught that wise lived an examined life. Self knowledge is a fruit of examined life. Every human person lives at least a partially examined life and feels the challenge of expansion of the horizon of that life.We Goans also feel the imperative to examine our lives. Some teach that Indians...
Let’s stop playing ‘statue’!
In recent days we have in several ways heard the cry to return to Goa and Goan-ness. There has been a forgetting of Goa and Goan-ness that is rightly sought to overcome by these cries. This re-articulation of the primacy of Goa and Goan-ness seems to take place within the question of Justice. Maybe we are challenged to ask...
Politics and the Sources of our Goan Selfhood
The sources of our self are being used and abused by political parties to milk votes and come to power. To understand our plight it might be important that we understand the sources of our selves. Indeed, we have an inner core self but it draws a sense of itself from our culture, religion, land , caste, family, peers, ...
The Konkani Grammar of Thomas Stephens
The Great work of Thomas Stephens opens the issues of the linguistics that guided him and others in their work on native languages. Stephens like other western grammarians working at his time and later with native languages in places like South America, India, China, Japan etc follow what has been called the Greco-Latin model. This is due to the...
Facing our Political Present -II
The filiations through mimicry have been an age-old strategy of some elements on the periphery to become absorbed into the centre and gain power. Humans do have a tremendous capacity to become what one hates. Unfortunately, in our desire to reject the imperial centre, we seem to have become copies of the same. This mimicking of the imperial centre...
The Silence of Buddha and the Silence of the Voter in Goa
The silence of the Goan voters is loud and clear. The sound of silence is reverberating even as the votes have sealed the fate of the candidates in the EVMs. For the first time, the Goan voter seems to have gone into a silent mode. Is this silence a fatigued response to the vitriolic campaign of the national and...
Facing our Political Present – I
Present is not politically neutral but is certainly politically pregnant. Our time is intense and we have to face its political challenge. We Goans have to face an inevitable politics of the moment. The very idea of Goa brings forth politics into our living present. Goa becomes several things to several peoples. This becoming of Goa is the...
