On Sunday the 16th of February, at around 7.00 pm a function was held in the Associação Académica de Moira Club to release a souvenir to mark to mark the century of the founding of the club.
The function itself was a nice one. It's what happened later that was surreal as far as I am concerned. Fr. Alexander the parish priest as the Chief Guest and the MLA of Aldona Constituency Glen Souza Ticlo as the Guest of Honour and others like the Advocate General of Goa, the Moira Sarpanch and a Goa Football Association representative as guests; besides the editorial team of Air Vice Marshal Giles Gomez Retd the cartoonist; David de Souza, the internationally renowned photographer and I on the dais. The speeches began and after President Oswald Cordeiro welcomed the gathering and praised me and my editorial team to the skies. I then spoke about how the souvenir was put together. Fr. Alexander and the other guests spoke. One copy of the souvenir was released. JUST ONE. There was entertainment by a band of talented youngsters and later a dinner was served to the guests. All this was fine. But even before that the bizarre had began. The souvenir which was supposed to be sold was not. People kept asking (and some had come from afar just for a copy) but the club committee was tight lipped and just ignored the requests without any explanation. This could only happen in Moira, I said to myself. Being the editor I know that 400 copies of the souvenir were delivered. Since the editors had an advance issue each, even if it is immodest to do so, I can say it's a fine volume, far better than anything normally seen as a souvenir in Goa, and everyone who I've shown it to agrees. You can well imagine my bitter disappointment given almost one and a half months of concerted effort done gratis by me and my team to bring out the volume. Why wasn't the souvenir being sold? I can't say for sure because they aren't telling me, but my guess is that they, (meaning my hate-club members) have found something to object to in what I wrote and have told the President to suppress it. The President wisely followed their advice and till today it's been suppressed. In the meantime however rumours in the village began to grow rife that I had written something defamatory or obscene. That's when I decided to throw a draft of the souvenir articles into the public domain so that people could see the articles for themselves and judge whether anything I wrote was offensive. I haven't yet heard a single complaint although I did get a lot of compliments on the various forums where I sent the articles. I'm sending you a link to the Goa Book Club which was one of the places where I sent the articles. I'm afraid this document lacks the colour photography of David de Souza and the cartoons of Air Vice Marshal Giles Gomez VSM which are in the print version and there are also some typos and errors which I edited out when proofreading. Still go through it and let me know what you think, and most especially if you think I've written something wrong. (Incidentally the link has some posts extraneous to the issue but just ignore them if you can't enjoy them.) https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/goa-book-club/iC1yDy2kjNk Best, Augusto