There is an unbreakable bond of a Goan with Goa and Goan-ness. Someone said that one may take a Goan out Goa but no one can take Goa out of a Goan. Goan-ness is territorial but it transcends it and lives with Goans everywhere in the world. It is like air we breathe. It is everywhere around us. Maybe...
Goa – Question and Its Erasures
The socio-political inheritance that afflicts our society in Goa demands us to conceive new ethical modes of solidarity of being Goans. This means the well being of all Goans is to become a moral imperative to us. Our fragmented solidarities based on caste, religion or geography have to give way to a more inclusive and all embracive Goa solidarity....
Goa – Its Opportunities and Challenges
Goa is a site of excessive transgressions. It is important that we Goans rise to this self consciousness. All excess defy singular assimilation. No amount of cerebral energy can assemble excess into understandable information. There always remains the surplus-extra that fails all efforts of reductive assimilation. Excess is everywhere. Absurdity is laughing into our face. Excess garbage is an...
Goa – Its Possibilities and Challenges
Goa has become another India for many of our countrymen. It is a place where excess and transgression are thought to be tolerated. Several tourists visit Goa to transgress the order of things ordered by their daily life. There is something profound in our culture that is aptly described as susegad by almost every Goan. It is difficult to...
Goa and Human Development
Most humans are narcissistic and easily fall prey to identity politics. Narcissism becomes visible particularly in the face of the other and his/ her otherness. The self and its other relationship is very central to any politics of identity. We often see the other from the lens of the sameness of self. This reduction of the otherness to sameness...
Freedom Fighters and Overseas Goans: A Psychoanalytic Reading
The unfortunate angry outburst of the freedom fighters and their call for punishment of the Goans who have registered their birth in Portugal is in bad taste. The fact that they continue to use the term Goan to refer to these people shows that they too admit that they belong to Goa. With due respect to our honourable freedom...
Figuring Out the Figural in Goa
Although the reading habit is fast dying, we seem to have entered a reader’s world where we are habituated to read reality. This readability of reality and our enslavement to it needs explanation. Maybe we can begin with a provocative statement of Jean François Lyotard, (a French thinker) which proclaims that a text represses ‘the seen’(visible). Lyotard teaches that...
Remembering the First Fruits at the Konsachem Fest in Raia
Feasts are community celebrations in Goa. They are not merely spiritual celebrations but are social and become constitutive part of what makes us Goans. The feast of our Lady of Snows is one such event that brings out the best of Goan Christian tradition. Raiakars have the distinction of being the first to be converted to Catholicism in the...
The Goykar Coconut Tree
The issue of declassification of the coconut cannot be dismissed as political opportunism of some politicians. Coconut cannot be viewed in isolation of what may be called Goanness of our Goan community. Community comes into being from symbolic and narrative archives of a society. The coconut tree and everything associated with it is deeply embedded in the social archive...
Socio-cultural, Political and Ecclesial Context of Goa
Socio-cultural Context Goa is a post-colonial society. The colonial experience that lasted for 450 years continues to manifest in multiple ways. Besides the colonial past which being a Portuguese and catholic colonization which is different from the Aglican British colonization in the rest of India, Goans are still afflicted by the conversion of a part of its population during...
