THIS ARTICLE was probably written around 1998... not sure. Kindly note that a number of links might have changed or got inactive since. Also ignore my old, and much changed, goa1.dot.net.in email address. FN
------------------------------------------------------------------------ *_GOA-ING INTO CYBERSPACE: SMALLEST STATE IS ONE OF THE MOST ACTIVE_* *By Frederick Noronha * Goa may well be India's smallest state. It is possibly seen by many as too laid-back or sucegado. Roughly just one in every thousand Indians is from this state. But Goa has a surprisingly active presence on the Internet, which could put to shame many a bigger state in this country. Surfers, don't be surprised. Your Alta Vista search-engine might throws up a word count of some 45078 finds of "Goa" on the Internet in various home pages scattered across cyberspace. Or you might stumble across 4386 documents which match your query for this three-alphabet word which conjures up a lot of mental images. And these figures is growing by the day. Goa's place in cyberspace seems assured. Thanks to its expatriates, tourists who visited the state, and a small band of cyber-freaks based back home. This small region (size: 3702 sq. km; population 1.2 million) has a very high ratio of expatriates. Besides, there are many over- active foreign tourists have got enraptured enough with Goa and a brief holiday here. So, they've set up pages dedicated to this spot too. Or devoted to that zeppy but strange form of music called Goa Trance. Young Goans studying abroad kick-started the cyber-revolution over three years back. People back home were then still struggling to understand what it all meant, and the Internet was still a well-kept secret which most Indians were innocent about. Herman Carneiro, an expatriate Goan in his early 'twenties then studying at the North-Eastern University in Boston launched what he thought would be a fun-club. Initially just a few chatty students joined-in his mailing-list on the Internet, called Goa- Net. But life is what happens when you're making other plans. Goa-Net grew and grew. It succeeded; and how. Today, *GoaNet* has over 600+ members. Its members include top professionals, like noted litterateurs, scholars, engineers, World Bank staff, and others. It now has subscribers -- it doesn't cost to 'subscribe' -- in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Portugal, France, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Bahrain, Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Thailand, Mozambique and Italy. On its members list are also e-mail addresses from unfamiliar country codes. Like ZW (Zimbabwe), BM (Bermuda), SA (Saudi Arabia), GR (Greece), CH (Switzerland), FJ (Fiji), BS (Bahamas), OM (Oman), QA (Qatar), KR (South Korea), KE (Kenya), HU (Hungary), AE (United Arab Emirates), and AQ (Antarctica). In India, GoaNetters' subscribers are located in Mumbai, Calcutta, Pune and of course in Goa itself. To join *GoaNet* -- take care, volume can be 30K a day -- you only need to send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body write the message: subscribe goa-net your_real_name (If you have any problems, contact the writer of this article.) But not everybody would prefer to join *GoaNet*, simply because of its large volume of mail. So, there's another option called "Goa-Net Digest". For those who want an even less loquacious mailing-list, the Goa-News-Net offers a low-volume, news-only service. If Herman was the first with a mailing-list, Marlon Menezes, another student based in the US, set up what became Goa's first and most-noticed community web-site. His site, earlier called GoaWeb, has now grown into a full-fledged and well-maintained commercial site called GoaCom. This site offers a whole lot of reading matter, including recent news from Goa, for free. It earns its keep from commercial advertisers, and insiders tell us that business is fine. Because it doesn't know-tow to advertisers too much -- but is willing to carry critical articles too -- it probably retains its credibility among cyber-surfers. Marlon Menezes, now one of the core-team looking after GOACOM from where he's based at San Jose in California, says this web site plans to soon set up a "comprehensive new Goa music section", and another focusing on twenty villages from here. Goans, wherever they live, are usually very devoted to their home villages, and village-identities are very important to them. Another Menezes, Ulysses "Uly" Menezes runs an interesting and much-appreciated site. Check out this tastefully-created site at kuwait.net/~ulysses/goa Goa-Interactive -- run by the Naik Brothers in Goa -- is another community site, as is Goykar. The latter is maintained by one of Goa's most knowledgeable cyber-enthusiasts Joseph "Boogie" Viegas. GoaResearchNet is meant as a meeting place for academics and students keen to keep abreast with what's being done in the field of scholarly pursuit related to this region. (Disclosure of interest: this writer admits having a hand in the GoaResearchNet, but also feels guilty about not doing a good-enough job on keeping this site regularly updated!) Numerically, these sites are a tiny drop among the sea of Goa- related cyber-halts one can alight at. Many more sites named after (or linked to) Goa are set up by tourists -- including the hippies who were once synonymous with this place. There's a range of information about Goa now available in cyberspace. Music, fiction, hotel ads, books available at a mail- order bookstore at Mapusa, ambient air quality in Goa, trance music, cartoons from Mario Miranda and local cartoonist Alexyz, photographs from here, regional food, news from the area, business directories, ads from the realtors' lobby and of course, tourist information. There are Goa-pages in languages ranging from Japanese to Italian, Swedish, or Portuguese. Of course English predominates. Sometimes, discussions also take place in Konkani, the regional language. Strangely, the interest in cyberspace in Goa itself is not as high as that among its expatriates and tourists. Only now has interest been built up, and for long things seemed to be moving slowly. Goa got a VSNL node sometime in February 1997. That too after a lot of lobbying by expatriates, who did help speed up the node's arrival. Poor phone lines, a limited computer culture, high costs and delays in taking to cyberspace are among the limiting factors blocking the Internet's growth here. So is the fact that Goa is not a big city -- as many think -- but actually still an rural-majority state. But, by now, more options are speedily opening up. Low-cost modems are now available in Goa. Private parties are offering inexpensive set-ups for Internet novices too. Cyber-cafes of sorts are run by people like Boogie Viegas from Porvorim. Realising the potential of e-mail communication, private PCOs are offering such services for Goans to keep in touch with families and friends abroad. One initiative that should really help in the years to come though is the Computers-in-Schools (CiS) project. Expatriates from Goa have launched steps to give a push to computer education in their home state, and are using the Internet to promote efforts in this direction. Their totally volunteer-driven project does not involve big funds, and the little money that comes in is from individuals. CiS aims at offering skills, support, ideas and contacts to help schools set up their own computer labs. The project is trying to show that one doesn't need tonnes of money to get a useful idea rolling. Only a handful of schools have benefited so far. But loads of enthusiasm has been generated. In St. Francis Xaviers' School at Mapusa, many students today learn computers instead of needlework. One foreign tourist, Dave Futers, also supported this schools' computerisation plans in a big way, and it even got an Internet account. Other expatriates collected donations for buying computers for Bal Bharati Vidya Mandir in Ribandar. Some Goa-based computer professionals also volunteered their time and skills. Expats sent back CDs with educational shareware for local schools to experiment with. Things are looking up. If the interest can be sustained, this could work out to something useful. Cyberspace, if well used, could perhaps be something ideally suited for a region like Goa. Not many other small societies of this size have overseas associations based in places as remote as Los Angeles, Toronto, Wimbledon, Lisbon, Oslo, Nairobi, Kuwait, Melbourne, and elsewhere. Recently, while discussing things, it was discovered that a Goan nurse had reached as remote a place as the Arctic circle. On a personal note, the Internet can be a win-win game for everyone, if well used. This writer, for instance, sends out news updates about what's happening in Goa. That earns one a lot of friends, who are, say, willing to send out a local-fax from their computers to offices in Vienna or London. Goa-related mailing-lists and web-sites also help this scattered community to make a lot of new friends and rebuild old links. Despite the traditional Goan characteristic of being quarrelsome! Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha (FN) | http://www.fredericknoronha.net Freelance Journalist | http://www.bytesforall.org http://goalinks.pitas.com | http://joingoanet.shorturl.com http://linuxinindia.pitas.com | http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks ------------------------------------------------------------------------- T: 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 M: 0 9822 122436 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
