If the Big Bad Flood Had Happened in Goa

(30 Jun ’13)

            We’ve never been as unlucky as Orissa or Uttaranchal with cyclones and floods, to some extent because the west coast (exception: Gujarat) has never borne the brunt of Nature’s fury as much as the east. Another reason is that the Brits in Mumbai and the Portuguese in Goa did something called ‘planning’ for towns and villages, a concept our ancestors kind of understood, now alien to us. In spite of having ‘decent’ rains year after year, Goan housing colonies and hotels still buy tankers of water. But we’re not talking about our fiscal stupidity here.

            Suppose, just suppose, a calamity of Uttaranchal’s proportion happened here. Since we’re fighting for special status, first we’ll cry ourselves hoarse for the centre to help us. When the water has risen above our ankles, the auto-rick guys would charge Rs 500 from St Inez to Caculo Mall. Taxis and pilots would accordingly hike their fees. You can calculate the cost for other distances.

Milk, sugar, bread and fuel would suddenly go ‘black’. Fish wouldn’t be a problem. We eat anything that swims. In a flood, should the larvae of amphibian and insects grow beyond three inches, we’d be happy to catch, fry or chuck them into gravies.

            Gravies remind me of coconuts and the trees they grow on. If the water goes above a couple of metres high and thanks to the plastic clogged naalaas doesn’t flow into the sea, (that would happen soon enough), we’d have to get onto slimy, slippery, unsafe rooftops or up the safe and sturdy emblem of Goa, the coconut palm. Problem here: it’ll be too late to take tree-climbing lessons and it’s unlikely that the bhailley who we hire to do the job (“oh-so-sloppily” we complain) will agree to take us piggy-back for money or love or threat. Forget climbing the roofs and palms, so used to wheels are we that without our bikes, scooters and cars, we’ll have to depend on our limbs: that’s a disaster in itself. Except for trained sportspersons and the getting-extinct hands-on Goan farmer… only doctors know whether and where our thigh and calf muscles exist. We make up with the strength of our jaws, but in or under water, of what use with that be to us?

            Once the number of dead and affected rises beyond the combined fingers of the Legislative Assembly Members, the Government will call in the Defence Forces. It would be a shame to call in the very Navy that we didn’t want in our state. The uniformed guys won’t say “we’ll save only Karwar or Sindhudurg”, will they? They’re not like us, they do their jobs and they do them well. They’ve proved this time and again, whether they’re dealing with enemies, or children who’ve fallen into wells, earthquakes, naphtha leaks or floods. In fact, we’ll be dependent on the people we’ve always cribbed about: the cops, the fire-brigade, the municipality workers, the labourers from the NE, Bihar, UP, Andhra, Kerala, etc.

            Our village brethren will no doubt bury all hatchets and help save each others’ dukors and mhashee. After the floods recede, we will ask for our pound of flesh for sure. Our television media will hyperventilate about how we didn’t have enough ghee to cremate the Hindu dead (do the dead have a religion?) nor any blessed land to bury the Muslims/Christians/Jews. NRIs will weep over heritage lost. Only a few will start: 1. Taking classes for children so they don’t lose out on their learning years, 2. Prepare for prevention of epidemics by disposing of decaying corpses, 3. Building shelters of all kinds, 4. Collecting and distributing food, water, clothing. In spite of what the tv channels say and we moan about, it’s the government machinery alone that does most for rehabilitation. The others do fringe work. Some even believe that techniques of meditation and prayer-chants are more important than availability of drinking water, medical aid and dealing with sewage.

            I read on the Net someone’s comment. Not verbatim: “… a shrine was ‘disturbed’, hence this calamity happened.” When will we learn that our heritage lies in our thoughts and behaviour? Principles and skills must and do outlast buildings and statues. If we face a calamity of this proportion in Goa, what will we mourn most? Destruction of our temples/churches? Our value system? Language? What?

            Lots will happen after the floods. NGOs will spring up to take care of the welfare of mosses, rodents, oldies, babies, and now that our Freedom Fighters are on their way off the planet, will demand free railway passes and pensions for their ‘causes’.

            Dear fellow Goemkars, we have to learn from Uttranchal’s tragedy. Now.

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Contrarywise

(19 Feb ’12)

            Nothing artificial, no plastic, everything as Nature intended it to be: some people like to be like that. They’re the kinds who make rassagullas and spaghetti at home. They buy ingredients from shops that promise them they are grown with cow-dung. No chemicals, nothing artificial about what goes into their mouths. If you notice, they lug back kilograms of organic stuff, sun-ripened, hand cut or ground or plucked, packed in jute or paper bags, to their cars. There are a few who use cycles made of steel and hardened rubber tyres, but they’re really only a few. Mostly the organic-food, khadi-kapda-natural-dyes, no-synthetics kinds are also lovers of new cars and air-conditioners. Bullocks and carts that go with them are a bit too natural to use.

            I use either my feet or the local bus to take me from point A to B. I carry canvas bags to avoid strangling the gutters with discarded polythene bags. At the end of a shopping junket, I’m quite often exhausted. It’s preserving me versus preserving the planet, I feel at times.

            The Earth Saving Mantra comprises three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

            Reduce actually means don’t shop. It means you can do with eight sets of clothes. One for each day of the week and one for formal occasions. I believe in uniforms. If every office or factory worker wore one, they’d save on their own clothes. Companies aren’t likely to buy new stuff readily, so overall there is a reduction in use of one’s personal clothes. What will happen to the economy if people don’t shop? How’d I know, I’m Green. Now Reduce means shop only when necessary. You break a chappal, buy another. You run out of perfume, buy another. Is perfume a necessity? Fresh topic for debate. It could be flower-based, not synthetic. What if it’s sandalwood based? Sandalwood is almost extinct. Should one extract oil from it for cosmetic use? Is man to live by bread alone? Would this come under Beauty Without Cruelty or is that restricted to fish, feathers and four-legged creatures? Reduce will save you a lot of dusting, tidying and money: think egg-beaters, chapatti-makers and milk-boilers. And, curios: plastic Japanese dolls, plaster of Paris Ganapatis, pen-stands, table-lamps, ashtrays, Taj Mahals imprisoned in acrylic, brass vases… thank heavens for digital photography, we are spared photograph albums. 

            Reuse means when that jar of skin-softening or hair-styling cream is over, wash it, dry it and use it to store masalas. No plastic you say? Line the container with foil. If you throw it…. You’re not really Green then. Real planet lovers shouldn’t be into new  mobile phones, televisions or anything that can be thrown away. Any kind of non-essential shopping is anti Planet.

            Recycle is what isn’t happening to our Goan Garbage. As far as plastic is concerned, the first two R’s aren’t being followed. Even the organic-foodies don’t. Most states have a wonderful community called the Bhangar or Raddhi walas. Goa doesn’t. We could, if we wanted clean neighbourhoods, burn our plastic stuff. We have some way to go before we realize that we create our own garbage without help from the Bhailley.

            Next on my agenda is the killing of eight Puneites by a bus driven awry. Everyone’s debating about how horrid the bus drivers are. Everyone also needs to figure out (for our own safety’s sake), how many drivers are diabetic, or have neurological problems, or are plain stressed out and overworked. Pilots have tests, even train drivers to, but not the bus chaps. I’ve traveled multiple times by Kadamba and Maharashtra State Buses in and out of Goa and can vouch for the quality of their driving: good, and even on very wet, poor visibility monsoon days. We spare no thought, no time for training (be it of policemen, teachers, surgeons or tailors) and then we bad mouth them when something goes wrong. I think the aam aadmi needs to be locked up once in a while for jaywalking. I have little sympathy for someone who has dodged across moving traffic and then got injured. Ask for trouble, and you’ll get it. How is it that no mother is ever pulled up when a child runs onto the road and gets injured by a passing vehicle? I’ve never heard of a motorcyclist getting into trouble for weaving in and out of speeding traffic. Truck-drivers are rash. Of course. But motorcyclists are rash, too, far more often and dangerously so.

            Having said that, may you and yours reach home safely, day after day, and may you consider going organic even whilst you’re wondering how to deal with the plastic waste in your house. Ciao.

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Goa in the year 2025

          The election fever has put Orwellian ideas into my head. What will Goa be like after ten years? My guesswork depends on my imagination. I don’t put my mind in a twist with ‘statistics and other lies’ (some great person has said this before me, hence the quotation marks).

          There will be so much competition amongst taxi-drivers, auto-rickshaw owners and bus-operators that some teenagers will be forced to take less popular options like medical, teaching and engineering courses. Neighbours will look at their parents sympathetically. Musicians and artistes will be frustrated with the lack of opportunity; politicians, too, what with the common man clamouring for his/her portion of power. Since most Freedom Fighters by then would be dead, their freebies might get transferred to the above jobless persons.

Since by then birth and family name, caste and ‘native-place’ won’t be of consequence, many children might be conveniently numbered rather than named, so that the same number could be merged with the Aadhar card/ cell-phone connection. Hindus might start naming their children Sid (short for Siddhanand) and Mac (Makarand) and Christians may share the copyright with Sikhs for names like Dimple, Dolly, Honey. The trends/ fashions regarding nomenclature of human off-spring will depend on the television serials of the time. Not jesting: three generations in India didn’t use the name ‘Pran’ because of a screen-villain.  

          Since Goa would have consistently opposed every option to broaden or modify existing roads or build new ones, Maharashtra and Karnataka might consider building a sky-highway by-passing Goa entirely. That way none of our trees will be cut/transplanted, nor any of our heritage structures or private homes be damaged. Was any such thing considered when we had objected to the building of the Konkan Railway long years ago?

          More malls will be seen dotting the ‘scape, like the stadia we now have, underused. But the food-courts and the escalator-rides will be the weekend high-points of young parents entertaining their children. The beaches, sand and sun will continue to attract tourists.

          The debate ‘Was Goa Liberated or Invaded by the Indian Armed Forces’ might continue, dentures-punctuated as a majority of the passionate participants would have crossed a certain age by then.

          If our fatal road accident rate doesn’t wane, we can expect the cadaver-transplant program of medical tourism to flourish. And our young-to-old ratio to get skewed.         

          Those involved in the Marathi-English-Konkanni disputes over script and official labelling will not notice that, whilst they were squabbling and opinionating, a west-coast version of a Konkanni-Hindi mix would have firmly rooted itself in the state.  Would we call it Konk-indi?

          Scientists and researchers from across the globe will be attracted by the Goan cows: having consumed and survived on plastic bags for five generations, this breed would have started producing latex like milk which one can stretch and chew straight from the udder. No refrigeration required, nor packing and transporting. Marvellous. The excess garbage we chuck all over our neighbourhoods will have its uses after all. 

Goan women won’t be wearing saris. For occasions, if you can’t follow the youtube-for-dummies’ instructions, there will be ‘experts’ from my generation (yeah, my friends and I don’t plan to quit the planet in a decade) to drape them for a price. Else, the celebration would have to make do with a stitch-on/ slip-on ‘traditional’ look. Our (today’s) South-West Asian ‘uniform’, the salwar-kameez might be out-dated, too (Wendell, do you agree?).  Since for long women have been wearing pants, men might sport a unisex look in bright kaaftaans with long slits at the sides: airy and easy to climb onto bikes. Bikes = traffic. Going by the narrowness of our roads and the number of vehicles on them, if I think of a traffic jam in 2025, my brain will suffer with the effort.  We may have vendors hawking wares atop vehicles as the space in between them might be difficult to manoeuvre through. Lack of space is never a problem for entrepreneurs with imagination. Conversely, this clogging of roads might mean reduced speeds and fewer deaths. Opportunity lost regarding medical-tourism, ref cadaver transplants above.

Each road, every turning will have either a chapel devoted to an obscure saint or a temple raised in the ‘honour’ of one of our very many gods/ swamis. Or a statue in the memory of a dead local ‘leader’. Made of bathroom tiles and festooned with plastic ornaments, these ‘places of worship’ would be considered part of Nouveau Goan Culture. Xit-kodi would have bowed out what with scarce fish and imported coconuts priced out of reach. Bhakri, that lowly roti patted out of rice or nachni flour will be unknown. It’ll be replaced by machine-made sliced bread. Isabgol sales will reach an all time high.

Computerised governance would have taken its toll on corruption as we know it. Of course, fertile criminal minds will come up with new versions of old tricks. The war of black versus white, good versus bad, will continue. But now that we’re at the nadir of many things, I see an upward trend in people’s aspirations and demands. One example: those who were promoted till class eight without quality, testing or deserving to, will know that mere promotions and certificates aren’t of any value. Parents will want teachers who know their subjects and how to transfer that knowledge to their students. We may have to import (wo)man power to benefit our institutions. Students themselves may want tougher exams, stricter merit-based selections and quality of skill and talent will be respected. The young are often wiser than we give them credit for.

Goa will get the award for the maximum number of on-line groups: www.ukgoans.com; www.usagoans.com; www.polishgoans.com; www.belgaum.goans.com; etc. from Ratnagiri to Russia, Goans will connect with other Goans, niz or not, just to know what’s happening in the land of their ancestors. Special apps will be invented so neighbours can quarrel in cyberspace, instantly and across time zones, over bordering walls and branches that stray across them. And keep track of which sibling/ cousin is selling his/her share of property (wonderful word, bonds families together … or pulls them asunder, and makes lawyers rich).

Today, my mother and her ilk moan at the loss of Goempunn. I’ve heard people similarly grieve over Kashmiriyat. Every state, every ilaakaa, every generation believes that the good is lost and is replaced by the bad. I’m optimistic that, in a decade from now, irrespective of pessimists predict, Goa will be a better place to live in: with pluralistic, tolerant views, afforested erstwhile quarries, harvested rainwater, public transport to die for, caring ministers and efficient officials at the helm, ... and possibly unclogged gutters.