goenkar anik goenkarpon

Here’s a question for you: What do you think of as “home”?   For some, it’s the place they grew up; or, if their early years were a bit more geographically diverse, the childhood home they spent the most time in, or have the happiest memories of. For some, it’s where family is—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. For some, it’s a place they’ve settled and made their own. For some, like me, home is wherever you happen to be living, with maybe a little family that’s come together (comprising beasts both two-legged and four).   Today’s story is the second in our December series, Going Home. A little more than a week ago, I was talking to Prem Panicker, the author of this piece and a widely respected thinker and writer, with about three decades of experience as a professional journalist (having been, among other things, part of the founding team of Rediff and managing editor of Yahoo India). “I was thinking of writing about home in the sense that, well, I wake up this year and s

They say you only realize what you had when it’s gone. But the crushing tragedy of our information-saturated 21stcentury is much worse. We know exactly the value of what we have, but still throw it away heedlessly and forever. Could things possibly turn out different for the newly accounted treasure-houses that have been discovered under the surfaces of Goa’s rivers? Two consecutive surveys by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in the giant Zuari and the relatively diminutive Tiracol have revealed an extraordinary biodiversity bonanza of global significance is still hanging on in the state’s inland waters, despite all odds. We know it is there. What happens next is yet to be determined. India’s smallest state is marvelously riparian, its identity and image born from swift-moving waters and rich khazan lands. Nine rivers flow from the magnificent Western Ghats to the Arabian Sea: the Mandovi/Mhadei, Zuari, Tiracol, Colvale, Sal, Talpona, Saleri, Canacona and Galgibaga (thes

Colonialism, Christians and Sport: The Catholic Church and Football in Goa, 1883-1951 James Mills University of Strathclyde Glasgow, Scotland Abstract The chapter uses the development of football in Goa, the Portuguese colony in India until 1961, as a case study with which to critique existing histories of sport and colonialism. The start point of the article is that when taken together existing studies of football in particular, and to an extent sport in general, in colonial contexts bear a range of similarities. Broadly speaking a model can be drawn from them, one in which Christian missionary activity and colonial government projects act to introduce and encourage western sports among colonised populations who then eventually adopt and adapt the games. The Goa example offers a fresh perspective as it argues that while elements of the story of football there are familiar from these other studies, the role of indigenous agents in propagating the game at its earliest stages is cruc

There are fighting bulls in Goa, a small state on the west coast of India. They are the cause of enough noise, frantic sprinting, and even bloodshed to recall the bull runs of Pamplona earlier in the century. But this is Goa at the end of the century. And the bullfight here is one in which the bulls fight one another. When there is bloodshed, it is not caused by an elegant matador, sequinned and rakish, but by a pair of horns filed and sharpened down to a lance point. There are no fences or barricades here. Bullfights are usually held in an old rice field just outside a village, and the crowd -- whose complex Sunday lunches quickly become a liability when it's time to get out of the way of an unreasonable animal -- provides the enclosure. They do reluctantly put up the odd rickety bamboo fence to provide token protection for a visiting VIP, but everyone in the crowd knows that a few sticks of bamboo will do absolutely nothing to halt half a ton of charging bull. Fighting bulls bea