HOW MANY GOANS ARE THERE WORLDWIDE, REALLY? The story behind the figures...
The author is a Canada-based statistician who has put together estimates of how many Goans there could be worldwide. The figures are available online at http://bit.ly/rd3K8J and http://bit.ly/r8uMAU Nazareth agreed to share the back-story of these figures, when requested by Goanet Reader recently. This account was meant to be a reply to a journalist's queries, and hence its personalised tone. By John Nazareth jhr_nazar...@hotmail.com By way of some background, I live in Mississauga, Canada, was born in Uganda and lived there until 1973, a year after the Expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin. Before leaving to do my postgraduate studies in London and coming to Toronto in 1974, I had a BSc in Mathematics/Physics from Makerere University, Uganda, and subsequently added a postgrad diploma in statistics from the London School of Economics, an M.Sc. in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Toronto and an MBA from York University in Toronto. My ancestral links are to the village of Moira in Goa. I worked for three years in the Ministry of Finance & Planning in Uganda, and am now a Senior Reliability Specialist with the Maintenance Engineering Department of Bombardier Aerospace, my workplace for thirty years. Now in the twilight of my career, I will be retiring in a few months. One stumbled into the field of Reliability Engineering by accident in 1978. Reliability is the application of statistics in engineering. It happened by chance -- or, as one might prefer to say, by the grace of God. One has had the good fortune of becoming an expert in the field of aircraft in-service statistics and have had a hand in creating several world standards in the field. In particular SPEC2000 Chapters 11 and 13 with the Air Transport Association of America. While having had a share in management for several years, it has been in the technical field that I feel able to have made a unique contribution. Because of my training and profession, I have always been enthralled with numbers. It has also been because of the Uganda Expulsion and aftermath that I became so involved with playing a role in things Goan. In Uganda I had come to consider myself an African, but when most of the Goans left and I was just one of three Goans remaining in Entebbe, my home town, I came to appreciate Goans. Their departure felt like the death of a parent. You are always with your friends, but when your mum or dad dies, you the feel it big time. So on reaching Canada, I decided to play a role in Goan affairs. In 1982, as Vice-President of the Goan Overseas Association, I did a general survey of Goans here. Although it was not a census, based on a lot of numbers gathered, I was able to do my first estimate of the size of the Goan population of the Toronto area. (Later I became President of the G.O.A. in 1985 and the defacto historian of the Goan presence in Ontario by writing the history of the Goan community for the 25th anniversary of the GOA in 1995.) From my love for numbers, over the years I made notes of Goan populations -- even scraps of information. Then one day in 2010 or so Milton Rodrigues in London emailed several people desperately looking for numbers on the Goan population scattered worldwide. Someone forwarded it to me. I could have just said that there was nothing. But I sat down and wrote based on all the scraps I had. Sometime after that Frederick Noronha took an interest and wrote an article about it. Thanks to that, I decided to be more serious about the subject. Another thing that has helped has been my curiosity of the Goan experience in different parts of the world. Some Goans feel resentment about Goans from other places, always thinking that they try to lord it over someone else. Instead, I have been interested in all our collective experiences. As a result I have made friends with Goans from all over. I have many good friends from Karachi, my wife and I have belonged to two prayer groups mainly with Goans from the Gulf, I've wondered about the ethnicity of Mangaloreans and so on. (Thanks to Alan Machado Prabhu I was finally able to confirm that Mangalorean Christians and Hindus came from Goa and so I've added them to my count.) About the tools I use, my profession in Bombardier has led me to being creative. Over the years I have developed methodologies and software that has helped make Bombardier a world leader in analysis of aircraft reliability performance -- something that has surpassed bigger airframe manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus. This is not because I am a genius, but because by the grace of God I am one of the very few statisticians that works in this field. Most do not even realize how much they can do in this industry. We have been creative in developing metrics to measure our customers' pain. I have used this inventiveness to estimate Goan population numbers. This was important because in general there are very few censuses of Goans, mainly because Goa is not a country, neither are Goans a unique religion (like the Sikhs or Ismailis). My estimation of Goan population in the world has been a continuous thing. There have been census data of Goans from (of course) Goa, East African countries (which, amazingly, enumerated Goans separately for many years). But more than that, one has talk to people. I know some clerics in Pakistan who were able to give me numbers of Goans there based on church stats. Likewise I obtained Christian Mangalorean numbers from Mangalore. My original guestimate of Goan numbers in Portugal was way off at 5000. I have since read sources that say it is more like 80,000, which I have added to my more recent estimates. But Goans in Portugal present a unique challenge. Who/what is a Goan? Pop-star Remo Fernandes, speaking in another context, was close in stating that Goa is a state of mind. Do Goans in Portugal think of themselves as Goans? What about the second and third generation Goans there -- would they even be aware that they are Goans? This is not an issue (yet) with Goans from elsewhere it the world. But I've met some Goans who deny their Goanness and call themselves Portuguese. Another source of my interest came from a Professor of Anthropology that I met in Chandor, the former capital of pre-Portuguese Goa (which I was visiting to see the site of the Kadamba Kings, thanks to the late Prof Olivinho Gomes). Prof Robert S. Newman was an American lecturing in La Trobe University in Australia. His assertion was that Goans have been multicultural for a thousand years, and the world can learn from them. I got a life lesson from my brother, Prof Peter Nazareth. Peter has been part of the International Writing Program for some thirty years. In this program each year about 30 writers from around the world come to the University of Iowa to learn from each other. Peter told me that although he doesn't run the program, many of the people would gravitate towards him and his wife. He put that down to his Goanness -- Goan are cultural brokers who get along with everyone -- and everyone feels at home with us. Perhaps I should call this the Newman Effect. Back to those numbers. Because there are Goans in Canada from all parts of the world one could quiz them on getting a feel for numbers in their former regions. This has not been easy as very few Goans have a feel for numbers. For example, Goans from San Francisco could not tell me whether their numbers were closer to 1000 or 5000. I have no problem with putting numbers down even if I am not sure. In fact I started putting down my confidence level of the numbers. I am counting on Goans' critical nature. They will look at my numbers and say, "What do you know? You're all wrong." And then they would share some numbers from their experience. As I said, one has to be creative because one is not going to get more definitive numbers. My intention at some point is to conduct a census of Goans in North America. I will try to find someone young here in University who can get a credit for this. I have some ideas that I need to develop before I say more. As pertains to the NRI affairs department of the Goa government, I have not been in contact with them, but I have read their studies. Their difficulty will always be the fact that Goans started migrating in large numbers in the late 1800s and so the government had no way of estimating those numbers. They did a good job of estimating more recent migration numbers. The reason I didn't contact them is really that I was doing this for the love of it. But now there seems to be a growing serious interest in this -- and given that I am retiring I may well be more rigorous in the years to come. (GoanetReader)