Hi Linken, enjoyed reading your tribute to Alito. As always you too dig and analyze beyond the surface. It’s a gift.
Would appreciate if you could explain what “giving people a voice entails”. Roland. Toronto. > On Aug 8, 2021, at 11:46 AM, Linken Fernandes <linkenfernan...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > I've just come out of the online tribute to Alito Sequiera and the release > of the book, Hanv Konn. I wanted to make a comment, but the earlier > speakers had more than covered the universe of discourse relating to Alito > so I spared the patient international audience my reminiscence about the > chap, but do let me make it here, for the record. > I met Alito in the early eighties when he was based in Margao before he > went off to Bombay to do his M.A. I had just come to Goa after a couple of > years of journalism in Bombay. What stood out for me was the strictness, > the academic rigour, Alito brought to any discussion or piece of writing. I > was particularly impressed by a report on mining in Goa that he had written > for a research project organised by Claude Alvares. The thing I liked about > it was the narrative style. It was written like a conversation between a > student of mining and an expert in the field, the student asking questions > of the expert and the expert explaining like he was talking to a > 5-year-old. (Imagine a play in print). All heavy stuff of course, a lot of > statistics, as you can imagine, but delivered in a very accessible, > reader-friendly mode. No guff, just plain solid substance. > Another thing that impressed me was his obsession with Goa. I didn't > recognise it then, of course, but, maybe it was a childhood spent far away > in Africa, far from the paradise on earth that his folks kept talking about > all the time that stoked his passion for the place. Being a Bombay guy, > this seemed a bit strange to me, someone being so mad about a backward > place like Goa. But I entirely got the focus he brought to his passion. > There was the time he told me about how he had hitchhiked the length of Goa > from Pernem to Canacona while in college just so he could get a feel of the > place and the people. He thumbed rides from truck drivers and spent nights > in people's homes in the villages he passed through. I hope he has left a > record of this somewhere. > It was this earnestness, this need to get totally inside a subject of his > interest, that I related to and found very congenial. My takeaway from the > meeting today, as I put it in my comment there (two commas added for > clarity): Alito saying that we need to give people a voice, more than just > the right to speak, encapsulates what he was about.