The Menezes Duo Goa's forgotten history in cyberspace Frederick Noronha fredericknoron...@gmail.com
Eons ago, it seems, when we had more hair than face, and all that hair was black, that was when tiny Goa's history in cyberspace first started rumbling across the planet. A fortnight ago, this column looked at the work of Goanet-founder Herman Carneiro, then a 17-year-old, who launched the pioneering (even at the pan-India level) emailing-list called Goanet. It would be unfair not to focus on the almost simultaneous, mid-nineties initiatives from the Menezes duo. Marlon Menezes of Divar/US and Ulysses Menezes of Bastora/Kuwait were were both Goan expats. They were schoolmates in Mount Abu, and not related despite sharing a surname. Serendipity struck. Both launched similar experiments, which significantly shaped the perception of Goa in the outside world. So how did the idea of GoaWeb (as it was initially called) strike Marlon? He told me recently: "I was a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1990s. My university also happened to be the centre of the internet revolution at that time and was where the first web browser called Mosaic was developed. Until then, the internet was text based (called Gopher), which did not have a very user friendly interface. I remember connecting to sites such as CERN from my school office with a simple click of a link and wondering why not have something for Goa itself?" They rest, as they say, is history. This small initiative went on to grow into GoaCom.com. It set up some of the very first web pages on Goa -- even before governments, universities, newspapers and industry got into the act. The infrastructure was available for free at his university. "In any case, I was just doing it for fun and I really had no expectations for success or failure," as he put it. Marlon, first interested in the tech aspects soon realised his "big gap in my knowledge of Goa itself as I had hardly lived in Goa". Many expatriates face such issues. He reminisced recently: "I had grown in Kuwait and my experience of India was limited to my stay in Mt. Abu, Rajasthan. History had always been a subject that was dear to me, and we had learned a lot about India in general, but very little about Goa. My earliest projects were to create maps (very basic by today's standards) of some of Goa's cities and animations of the Portuguese conquest of Goa and then India's liberation of Goa." Kuwait-based Ulysses Menezes, meanwhile, set up the community-oriented Goan-World.com. He recalls: "Connecting dots to complete the puzzle was the biggest challenge, and still is, for Goa and its people spread out on this planet. Once we opened up on the Net it offered something to look forward to without being in Goa itself. The Carnival, San Joao, The Catholic feasts and Hindu zatras, the mango season, and Goa diaspora events [is what we managed to put online]." A small ordinary camera with a 35mm roll was what it took to get started. "The more I saw the demand and the encouragement received from the people, fuelled me to move further up the ladder," says he. "Once Goanet started it was a take off point to get in touch with reporters, writers, organisers." Marlon's GoaWeb meanwhile grew into GoaCom.com, a site which was commercial and sold advertising space, but also had community-building goals, and offered free space to non-profit initiatives too. He roped in his father Jerry Menezes, and extended members of the family or family friends, Tim de Mello of Anjuna/Canada and John D'Souza. Three of the four had a background in engineering. "John was my uncle who unfortunately passed away earlier this year. He was called the 'historian' of the family due to his interest in recording family events. I had written an article about the internet for him for the family newsletter that evoked a lot of interest. Separately John and Tim were friends from Africa," he recalls. Tim and John came up with the idea of a commercial website for Goa. Marlon, still in college, was open to collaboration. After awhile, he opted to close GoaWeb and focus on a unified platform. "We eventually realised the need for a local presence in Goa and one logical place was my parent's home! That is how my dad got involved." For a while, GoaCom ran out of a bungalow in Miramar, with Freddy Faria and Marilyn crafting the HTML code then needed to create websites. Those were the early days of the Internet, in India and in the world. Back in Goa, a few innovators like Prof Gurunandan Bhat, engineer Joseph 'Boogie' Viegas and others who could be counted on maybe the fingers of one hand, were clued in. When most people came across an email address on your visiting card, they were just bewildered. I recall taking a modem to the BSNL head office, and its officers, from the General Manager (Basak, if I recall right) downwards being stumped by how to deal with it. In those days, any attachment to a landline telephone (there were no mobiles yet) required a license and fee. "It is like a fax machine!" the officers concluded, after a short while of being embarrassed by their own lack of awareness. They verbally told me I could use it.... Marlon today recalls the impact their work, going back almost exactly 25 years ago this monsoon, had: "Just getting personal messages of support and interest from individuals from various parts of the world was very satisfying. The ability to form networks, organize groups of people, collect data was empowering. Things like the Computers for Goan Schools Project, campaigning worldwide for an Internet node for Goa, the networking of Goan associations around the world, and working with journalists are some examples," he recalls. Marlon recalls that while Goanet started in 1994 as an email-based list, "GoaWeb, which I started in 1995 took a different route into the world wide web, and we worked together. Ulysses was my senior and friend from St. Mary's, Mt.Abu. His Goa-World had a focus on the needs of the Gulf Goans. After some time, we (Goa World and Goacom) began to step on each other's toes which resulted in conflict between us. But that is the past, we have moved on!" For Marlon, the numbers started with a "few hundreds" and then went to about 2000 or so a day. An online radio station brought on listeners 24 hours a day. He recalls that there was a "constant tension" between the community, academic and fun aspects of networking -- which generated limited revenue but helped with branding -- versus the "commercial work that in theory helped pay the bills and helped provide the skilled manpower to helped with the 'fun stuff'". As webservices were commoditised, the margins on the commercial work started deteriorating and this impacted Goacom's ability to fund the "fun" parts of Goacom. Uly recalls sitting on a Linux platform on a private IRC chat called #GOA. There was Marlon, his sister Kendy, Herman and a few others. He recalls the site got a surprising number of hits. Jaime D'Mello started Konkani language lessons through .wav files. Surfers came mostly from Goans in the Middle-East, UK and the US, as Goa was still very new to the Net. VSNL operations opened here around only 1997, which made it easier for people in Goa to access cyberspace. Goa-World started when internet speeds were still an ultra slow 2400 baud. "There were considerable differences on the financials and intended directions of Goacom, which led to my exit in 2006," Marlon adds. "When your time is up, it is up!" Social media came to the play the role that the early pioneers were doing for Goa in cyberspace. Marlon remembers late journalist Joel D'Souza, who posted a lot to cyberspace from Goa, UK-based librarian Eddie Fernandes (whose GoanVoice UK is still going strong), Emmanuel DaSilva of the World Bank, Vishwas Chavan then of the NIO, Boogie Viegas (now in Costa Rica) on the tech front, Daryl Martyris who took forward the Computers for Goan Schools project, which then inspired folks like George Pinto to start up the pro-bono Goa Sudharop. Uly does sometimes feel he should have kept going. He recalls the role played by the late Jose Colaco, Cecil Pinto, Eddie DSa, Gasper Almeida, Wellinton Dias, Goanet, Goacom, Rewon Gomes many of the local clubs in Kuwait. Since the 1990s, he moved into indoor sport like Tenpin Bowling, and manages an Indian League. He's still in Kuwait and hoping to settle in Goa "some day". Now the father of two boys, Dr Marlon Menezes works for Magic Leap "a company with the resources that allows one to experiment with new ideas". He coaches his son's robotics team. Bee-keeping, rearing chicken breeds with different coloured egg shells and competing in triathlons takes up his free time. [Published earlier in The Navhind Times, Sept 15, 2019]