Valmiki Faleiro writes: "(Teotonio De Souza) uses personal anecdotes to good effect, as at pgs.132-133:
*On a personal note, if [laureate Umberto] Eco had a motive for creating his blind librarian and naming him Jorge from Burgos, I too may have one for discovering a Goan avatar of [Edgar Allan] Poe’s hero in my native village of Moira. In a bid to make a mark as fiction writer, he dabbles in the pre-historic glories of the mahars, claiming that they have fallen from grace due to victimization by Saraswats! He may run for shelter if I choose to reveal that one of my first cousins, a Saraswat, was married in Church to a woman from Moira adopted by a mahar family. He may persist in his obsession, like someone who insisted in convincing me that Jesus was a Brahmin, because his cousin, John the Baptist lived on honey and low castes (read locusts).* I don't appreciate the point that Valmiki seems to be making. Does he agree with TS that merely because his cousin marries the adopted daughter of a Mahar, TS gets absolved of his proclivity for toadying up to the Saraswats, the Catholic ones at any rate? If this is what he thinks is " the Teotonio trademark of trustworthiness" I'm not impressed. During his recent visit to Goa at a meet organized by Goa Book Club I questioned TS as to the reason for his bias and he came up with the lame excuse that there were no sources and that I should take up the job of writing the history of the Mahars. I retorted that I was a mere storyteller and not a historian, and that historians seem to choose methodologies which suit their biases. Incidentally, TS is quite the typical Moidekar Bamon ganvkar: this breed is notorious for taking potshots at people without having the courage to name names. Augusto