======================================================================== Goa's phone numbers change from Nov 10, 2002. Prefix old number with a 2. New numbers will be seven-digit 2XXXXXX (where XXXXXX is the old number). ========================================================================
'Every house in rural Punjab wants a rooftop plane' By Hindol Sengupta, Indo-Asian News Service New Delhi, Dec 1 (IANS) They are called the "rooftop plane" families -- because all of them have concrete models of aircrafts on their roofs. In rural Punjab, that's the greatest symbol of foreign money. Dollars and pounds flowing from family members settled in that magic land called "aboard". The airplanes are the most poignant image captured by filmmakers G. S. Chenni and Harleen Kohli in their hour-long documentary, "Nonresident Dollar", screened at the Habitat Centre here late Saturday. "They are the best way to tell the world that your family has money from abroad, that you've made it, that you've arrived," the filmmakers say in the film, as the camera moves across the words "Air India" painted on a dull grey model plane on a roof. The point the filmmakers are emphatically trying to make is -- almost every house in rural Punjab wants a plane. "With returns from farming steadily declining, it is felt that the only option is to go abroad," said the narrator in the film. To make "Nonresident...", the director duo travelled across the heart of Punjab, crisscrossing scores of villages in cars, carts and dozens of tractors. They found a land yearning to cross the shores, at any cost. "Where do you want to go?" the filmmakers asked a young man in a dirty kurta-pajama astride a tractor. "Foreign," he said. "But how?" they ask. "I don't know, but I will," he added, with a grim determination. That's almost a fatal determination, said professor Harbans Singh, interviewed in the film. A determination that urges young men and women to get married to non-resident Indians (NRIs) simply to go abroad, an urge so vital that songs about travelling West are now part of the folklore, more important than the undying love tales of yore. "I like England, I like the boy too," said one girl in gold embroidered lehenga-choli interviewed on her wedding day. Added another boy: "If you ask me honestly I am willing to marry any girl who will take me abroad. "See, if I put Rs.500,000 in business here, there's no guarantee of return and I can definitely migrate once I get married to an NRI." With visas and citizenships thinning down, marriage and illegal migration are the only options left to people who, as the film said, have "no modern skills, no knowledge of the Western culture and no clue of the language". But it doesn't seem to matter when you see your neighbour magically transform their hutment into a four-floor mansion, complete with the plane on the roof. And you see neighbours, who emigrated long ago, return with riches. Said Udham Kaur, settled in Britain for two decades: "Your own country is your own country, and you have to return to your fields, your water; but we must go, that too is important." The 75-year-old mother of a man living in the U.S. for the last 13 years shares the same sentiment, albeit in a rather different sense. "I ate bread and salt and bread and pickles for months to send my son abroad. "Now he is living with a white girl, but he will return, oh, yes he will. He finally wants to marry a Punjabi girl, someone I can talk to." Till then, as the song goes: "I am the son of a farmer, I want to go abroad." --Indo-Asian News Service ---------------------------------------------------------- What's On In Goa (WOIG): Nov 06 Children's book exhibn opens, Walkabout, Anjuna... (all weekdays) Nov 06 ArtHouse, Calangute: Chaitali's acrylics on canvas till 19.11 Nov 07 Revision of electoral rolls (till Nov 30) See schedule. Dec 01 Two day conference, Goa Agenda. IT For Society. (Ends 2.12) Every Sunday: Music therapy sessions at Moira, 5 pm. 278, N.Portugal ----------------------------------------------------------
