Lifetime Award Acceptance Speech It's been a great journey, thanks for the feedback By Cecil Pinto
Thank you, Goa Writers' Group. As I humbly accept this award for Lifetime Achievement, in Goan Humour Writing, many thoughts come to mind. Why are they giving me this lifetime award when I'm not even forty years old? Do they think I'm going to die soon? Do they think that I'm over the hill and cannot write anything good anymore? As I hold this statuette of Abbe Faria I think to myself how the west may have their Oscars and Emmys and Tonys and Bookers and Clios and Nobels and whatever. But there's nothing like an Abbe, babay! Where's the live TV cameras? Honey, won't this little Abbe look good alongside the miniature booze bottles in our formica showcase. When they first told me about this award I had to take an enema. Oops! I'm so overwhelmed, I can hardly read the points I've written on my shirt cuffs. It was an enigma why they chose me. Never in my wildest Caju Feni drinking sessions did I dream of this moment. Like any awardee I have to first acknowledge that I stood on the shoulders of giants so I could see further, but as the late tiatrist Jacinto Vaz advised me, I took off my chappals before climbing on! Unlike the other second-rate awardees at this annual Goa Writers ceremony, sitting there in the front with fake smiles, mine is a Lifetime Award so I can speak as long as I want. They get to speak for just twenty seconds. Ha! Whiners. Pathetic losers! And Jessica, yes you there Jessica don't look behind, unlike you I don't write lousy non-rhyming prose on separate lines and call it poetry. So there! My father is a simple man. My mother is a simple woman. That's why I am the way I am - a simpleton! I want to thank my parents for being staunch Catholics. If they had practiced artificial contraception I would not be here. We were so poor that we had to actually get up and walk to the TV to change channels. We couldn't afford a remote control model. When I passed my SSC I told my father I wanted to be a humour writer. Without missing a beat he said, "Wonderful! Just have a back-up profession, like refrigeration & AC mechanic maybe." My mother though, just laughed. That decided it. Better to make people laugh, than lug around refrigerators. Hi Mom, you watching this? No problem if you're not. I will send across VCDs of the show. Distribute them among all the neighbours and specially to Felix Uncle who said I should have studied marine engineering like his son who is now in Australia. Marine engineers don't get Lifetime Awards! Who cares if they're rich. I get to make speeches! Ha! My family provides me with so much material that I don't have to look far to find absurdity. My mother has been a powerful force - in her kitchen. But seriously, I have always wanted to make my family proud. I'm arrogant, so why can't they at least be proud? If it wasn't for the insomnia, panic attacks and irregular bowel movements, it has been an amazing journey. In addition to the wonderful people at GT, I want to thank everyone I've ever met in my life. The old man I met yesterday, who said he liked my 'essays' matters as much to me as David's sexy wife who invited me over late one night to discuss the 'mattresses business', and then tried to con me into attending a Japan Life presentation. That sure was a downer. Even complete strangers have helped me in my 'journey'. The other day a lovely young girl approached me on the street. I braced myself for the expected fan praise. This is the price of fame, I thought. Turns out she had never heard of me and just wanted twenty rupees to go to Margao. Bummer! I was helping her journey! Shame on you Mr Bush. Shame on you! Ok, I just always wanted to do that. There are many who have influenced me. Slapstick Konkani tiatr comedians who kept repeating their jokes and shouting their lines, Hindi movie comics with exaggerated gestures and make up, unfunny cartoonists in the local papers, writers of mediocre middles on the Edit page, people who submit unexceptional jokes to Life's Like That in Readers Digest. I saw all this and decided there was no future for original humour in Goa and so decided to sell flowers for a living. I still do. People ask me, how can you encourage people to laugh when Goa is in such a state of turmoil. I say to them "Do you know how much Dave Barry and Art Buchwald make? Do you know how much Shekar Suman and Siddhu and Cyrus Barucha make? Do you know how much Price Jacob makes? And John Da Silva? And William de Curtorim?? Ok, I know I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, but. Do you know a producer who can pay me big money to tell jokes in front of a camera? Thanks also to those mediocre journalists and TV interviewers who I had to hob nob with, and bribe with praise, to hype my way to this award. Lastly I want to thank all the great acceptance speech writers worldwide whose material I stole to write this speech. ******* Of course I didn't get a Lifetime Award and there was no Acceptance Speech, but a man can dream can't he? Last week marked exactly one year since I started this humour column for GT. Fifty two weeks of a column every Thursday - no excuses. Many agonizing moments when I can't think of anything funny to write about yet somehow I've always managed to conjure a topic out of thin air, or a conversation, or something I saw or heard. Many moments of self-doubt wondering if anyone actually reads what I write. But at the end if the day, and the year, it all evens out thanks to the feedback I get from readers. The strangers I meet at some function, or in cyberspace, who tell me they enjoyed so and so column - these people make it all worthwhile. And the close friend, who argues about my take on a certain topic, also makes it worthwhile. Thanks dear dedicated readers for making it all worth my while. And I hope that I can make you chuckle every Thursday for another one more year at least. ---------- The humour column above appeared in Gomantak Times dated 2nd November 2006 ===== _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
