Whenever my grandmother was exhausted with the world
around her, she would exclaim, "sonsar kabar zala".
She belonged to that generation, who believed the
world would soon come to pass. The correct name for
people who hold this belief is "millenarian"; people
who believe in a time of perfect peace following a
violent Apocalypse.
A purist millenarian believes that this perfect Eden
will be established here on earth itself, and this
pursuit of a Eden of earth has been with us almost
since the concept was invented. The Persians and Arabs
tried to establish and pursue it by building perfectly
symmetrical gardens, to replicate "paradiso". The
Pilgrims that fled to America on the Mayflower were
convinced that America was their Eden.
Such a hope lingers in us Goans, who are old enough to
remember the pristine Goa of yore. We want it to
remain exactly as we remember it, idealised as it is
in our memory. Unfortunately the memory plays tricks
on us, and we don't really remember the poverty, the
disease, the lack of access to education in premier
institutions, the parochial mindsets that made
second-class citizens of so many.
Progress and development are not dirty words. If we
are protecting traditional lifestyles we are also
handicapping them by our myopia. For instance one of
the reasons, farmers cannot compete with European and
American farmers is precisely because the
infrastructure that assists in transporting and
storing produce, the just-in-time management, the
canning and processing factories, the credit-lines,
the power and electricity, the fall-back insurance in
times of drought are not in place in a country like
India, and a state like Goa.
So while we protest against roads being built, power
houses and communications centers being set up,
manufacturing units or trucking terminals being
constructed, we may hail ourselves as heroes of the
underdog, but in the long-run we are robbing them of
their own livelihoods.
This is not to say that cowboy construction and
development should be the order of the day. It is just
to illustrate the point that living in the 21st
century necessarily means having to make compromises.
Compromises that may rob us of our idealised dreams of
a Goan life, but which might mean someone else has a
chance and the opportunity to live their dreams.
selma
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