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|Goanetters annual meet in Goa is scheduled for Dec 27, 2005 @ 4pm |
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|The Riviera Opposite Hotel Mandovi, Panjim (near Ferry Jetty/Riverfront)|
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The Diaspora Jigsaw
By V. M. de Malar
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Let's admit it; we feel more whole these days, when so many children
of Goa come back to celebrate holidays in the homeland. Sleepy bylanes
and quiet vaddos bustle with activity, with lights and star lanterns,
with family reunions and ceremonious parties.
Laughter resounds, joyful music rings out, our gentle village culture
may be under great pressure, and it languishes quite forlorn most of
the year, but this is the time of replenishment, when so many from the
diaspora return home.
What an interesting return it is. The multigenerational Goan family
reunion, circa 2005, is a sociologist's bonanza. Several generations
laced throughout the Lusophone and Anglophone worlds have borne rich
and unusual fruit.
Keep your ears open and you'll easily pick up clipped British tones
interspersed with the slower Australian drawl alternating with those
characteristic slower North American cadences and much more.
East Africa, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United
States, Kuwait, Qatar, U.A.E, Saudi Arabia, you name it, our striving
community is there in force. It is a story of struggle and
achievement, of tremendous fortitude in difficult circumstances.
There's mind-boggling adaptability. There is no surprise that the
first successful NRI in the West was a Faria from Colvale, or that
we've contributed mighty freedom fighters to the anticolonialists in
Mozambique and Kenya, or that the only Indian cabinet member in the UK
is our own Keith Vaz. We've got Goans representing Canada in field
hockey, another in Norway's football team, and yet another bright
young star burning up the amateur golf circuit in the USA.
This week, Victor Menezes gave 1.5 million dollars to the IIT campus
which nurtured his early promise. This grandson of Pomburpa had a
stunning career in international banking, including a stint as CEO of
global behemoth Citibank. It's the most striking corporate success
story in our diaspora, but hardly exclusive, not when you count
Menezes's brother Ivan, the North American CEO of giant distiller
Diageo, or the IT honcho Romulus Pereira, or Tony Fernandes and his
giant-slaying budget airline, AirAsia.
Alas, few of these overseas achievements have meant anything to Goa.
We Goans have a marvellous capacity to fade into the landscape, but
the flip side of this is that we can very easily become alienated from
another, especially in the diaspora.
So, associations proliferate to a ludicrous degree, round up five Goans
in London or Mombasa and you find that they hold six different pompous
titles in seven different absurd Goan clubs. It's cruel irony, we're
the world's best at adapting to adverse circumstances, but the world's
worst at adapting to each other.
Part of this is history's burden, the plight of a systematically
denationalized people that suffered genuine trauma during 450 long
years of colonization by a second-rate European power, and two
centuries of iniquity during the Inquisition. The fabled Goan cultural
fluidity was a survival mechanism, first of all.
Part of it is simple economics. Our homeland languished for centuries;
generation after generation has been compelled to leave. They flooded
in different directions -- to Portuguese Mozambique and British
Tanganyika, to Macao and to Brazil -- it's not very easy to come back
together after that psychologically violent dispersal to the ends of
the earth.
But we're in a new era now, with Western diaspora into third and
fourth generations, and Goa the prized tourism destination in a
resurgent India. Other parts of India have tapped the diaspora, and
are reaping huge financial, cultural and social rewards. There is no
reason why we cannot do it, and we really have to do it if we are to
hold on to what is recognizable in our homeland in this period of
rapid growth and development.
I walked the normally quiet hillside near Saligao this week with the
youngest generation of Goans, with American citizen holding hands with
Australian, with Mumbaikars joining voices with Londoner and
Torontonian. Tagore's aptly named 'Stray Birds' came rushing to mind,
a diasporic plaint: "lead me in the center of thy silence to fill my
heart with song." For it's almost 2006, and we've turned a corner into
unknown territory. As we put together the puzzle of Goa's future,
let's hope that some of those missing pieces come back.
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