It is quite a habit among Goans to obfuscate any bad news on the medical front, specially when it relates to major illnesses.
Everyone knows that cancer can and will strike at random, at all ages and mostly little is known about the reasons. It’s not a shame or some deficiency on one’s part to get cancer or heart problems and yet Goans are noted (in my experience) to deny it until it can be denied no longer. So lung cancer gets described as bronchitis or congestion, pancreatic cancer as indigestion, heart attacks requiring quadruple bypass as minor heart problems. It’s almost as if heart attacks, cancers and strokes are unlucky words never to be mouthed until it cannot be avoided. As a rider, there is this other Goan habit of trying to soft-pillow or entirely avoid telling kin of the passing away of some relative. For example there are two brothers, now in late seventies, who live in say Goa and Europe respectively. They have not been talking to each other for 25 years or more. Yet when the brother in Europe dies, in Goa they will refuse to tell the other brother of the news on the grounds that he will “get a shock”. I have had more than my share of ridiculous examples like this. Wonder whether this is true of other Indians or Asians as well. I have not come across this ‘bad news phobia’ among Europeans or Americans. Roland Francis Toronto.
