English 'Cook' dishes spicy tourism content for social media

russian clubs in qatar

Great voice waiting to sing in Bollywood now doing a mason's job in Goa

Tatoo festival in Goa: Baring your back for sake of art

Goa hosts Tatoo festival in Anjuna

Goa hosts Tatoo festival in Anjuna

Tatoo festival in Goa: Baring your back for sake of art

Great voice waiting to sing in Bollywood now doing a mason's job in Goa

Google the dealer meets Google the player

We have a fantastic story about something that Google is doing. It’s a little complicated. But fear not. Because I have the perfect example.

A few years back, some enterprising folks founded a company called Sigmoid Labs in Bangalore. It had just one product - an app to help rail commuters find out the status of trains, tickets and schedules. The app, thoughtfully named ‘Where is my train’ is a work of art. Perhaps you have used it. Not only was it built at a time when IRCTC was as helpful as an orange, but it also packed a bunch of great features. Offline train schedules. Live updates without GPS. No sign-up. And one more important feature. Instead of connecting to IRCTC (when it wasn’t down) to find out the latest status of your ticket, the app…read your text messages instead. Very convenient.

 

It got popular. Quickly. 10 million downloads later, it was the number 1 app in the travel category on the Play Store.

 

Then two months back, Google made an announcement. Apps could no longer get access to call logs and text messages of users. Google claimed that this was done to protect the data of its Android users. Exceptions would be made on a case-by-case basis. Companies had to apply. And Google would decide.

 

For apps like Where is my train, this was a huge blow. Just head over to the Play Store and read the reviews. It’s filled with users complaining that the PNR status feature doesn’t work anymore.

 

Now here’s the weird part. Guess who owns ‘Where is my train’?

 

Google. They bought them last month. 

 

Arundhati’s story today isn’t about this app. Like I said, this was just an example. But the story is about how Google’s decision affects companies across a range of sectors which depended on access to call and SMS logs. Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes for not-so-good ones. It’s about why this data set is important, and why companies fight to access it. 

 

But at its heart, our story is about Google and its conflicts of interest which extend across the stack—right from the operating system, to third-party SDKs embedded inside apps, and sometimes, like Where is my train and Google Pay, the app itself. 

 

Google decides. For itself. And for others.

How you can assist in the implementation of the Bombay High Court's order on cleaning up the blackspots of Goa.

Goa Foundation

1 hr

How you can assist in the implementation of the Bombay High Court's order on cleaning up the blackspots of Goa.

On 14 January, 2019, a bench of the Bombay High Court (Goa) comprising Justices Mahesh Sonak and Prithviraj Chauhan directed all the Village Panchayats to ensure that the (garbage) black spots and the littered waste, found within their respective jurisdiction, are cleared latest by 10.02.2019.

The Village Panchayats should thereafter make their report to the Directorate of Panchayats latest by 15.02.2019. The report should specifically state the number of black spots cleared and the location from which such black spots were cleared.

Want to assist in this exercise? Tomorrow is Sunday. Simply take a walk in the village with your mobile phone and take pictures of every blackspot you see. Ensure the pictures are delivered to your panchayat. If the panchayat has done its work, the blackspot should be removed and you should find all this mentioned in the report that the panchayats must make to the Director of Panchayats by 15 February.

Since we are monitoring the petition's movement in the High Court, we shall ensure that the report filed by the Director of Panchayats is made available to the public after it is filed in the High Court. You can then see for yourself whether the work you did was useful to your village and its efforts to remain beautiful.

Portuguese who speak the language poorly will have specific monitoring in England

Portuguese who speak the language poorly will have specific monitoring

Portuguese nationals living in the United Kingdom but poorly spoken Portuguese, notably of Indian or Timorese origin, will have a specific follow-up to Brexit, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities promised.

Manchester, UK – Portuguese nationals living in the United Kingdom but speak Portuguese poorly, notably of Indian or Timorese origin, will have a specific follow-up to Brexit, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities promised today.

José Luís Carneiro told the Lusa agency that the consuls of Manchester and London were given “the chance to diversify the typology of consular stays”, namely using translators and intermediaries who master their languages.

The Secretary of State admitted that there are “very specific communities that are completely unaware of the Portuguese language because of their national origins and that have much to do with the historical process of the way these communities were constituted.”

The realization of consular stays “specific to these communities will free the stations of a service with more delay because they are very singular cases”, he justified.

It is estimated that they reside in the consular area of ​​Manchester, which includes the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, about 20 thousand Portuguese born outside Portugal, not only in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, Guinea Bissau and Brazil, but also in India and Pakistan.

In the case of East Timor, although the Portuguese language is the official language, Tetum is a dialect most rooted in the community, very numerous in Northern Ireland, which speaks poor Portuguese and English.

In the consulate of London, only the number of natural inscriptions of India exceeds the 21 thousand Portuguese.

The initiative will not be unpublished: last year, both consulates held briefings on the impact of Brexit not only in Portuguese but also in Concani, Gujarati and Tetum, to reach nationals of Indian and East Timorese origin.

The reason is that Portuguese law establishes that natives of the former colonies of Goa, Daman and Diu born until 1961 can obtain Portuguese nationality, as well as their children, which many have done to take advantage of free movement in the European area and favorable conditions of entry into other countries.

Timorese born before Timor’s independence in 2002 can also apply for a Portuguese passport.

Ramesh Nata, a Portuguese native of Mozambique but with Indian origins, said that consular stays have been important in reaching the 12,000 Goans living in the Leicester region, and that they see Brexit as “very worried,” he said. today to Lusa.

“They want to know, for example, if they go on holiday next year, they can go back in,” he said.

The increase in the number of staff traveling to more remote locations, taking equipment that can collect biometric and personal data for the issuance of a citizen’s card or passport, or performing other consular acts such as birth registration, marriage registration or consular registration , is another measure of the contingency plan for the ‘Brexit’.

In 2019, there will be 35 “consular stays” throughout the United Kingdom, equivalent to 93 days, with premieres in Aberdeen, Scotland, St. Helier, Jersey, Isle of Man and Hamilton, Bermuda. 13 per cent compared to 31st of 2018.

However, faced with the concerns expressed this afternoon by association leaders at a meeting, the secretary of state exchanged messages by mobile phone with the minister of tutelage, Augusto Santos Silva, who gave him “green light” to expand that number and offer a service of ” proximity”.

The secretary of state had announced on Monday in London after a visit to the mayor of the British capital, Sadiq Khan, a reinforcement of human and technical resources, and the launch of a dedicated telephone line ‘Brexit +’, with a service center in Lisbon.

The measures are part of the contingency plan that will be triggered in the event of a non-agreement exit of the United Kingdom of the European Union (EU) on 29 March, which was tapped this week in the British parliament and which provided for a transitional period in which freedom of movement and European legislation were maintained.

In the absence of agreement, European citizens, including Portuguese citizens, will have less than six months to apply for resident status until December 31, 2020.

The registration will be done through an electronic system of the British Interior Ministry, which is still in the testing phase, which will have a mobile application to read the passport and a way to cross personal information with the tax and security databases social relations.

Police and pedestrians manhandle arrogant western tourist in Goa #siolim

The great Indian game of e-commerce laundering

Doing business in India is great, till you get too big for incumbents to ignore you. And you make their job easy by stepping on the collective toes of any number of politically powerful constituents like farmers, small businesses, government employees or retired army veterans. That’s exactly what Walmart’s $16 billion purchase of Indian e-commerce leader Flipkart in May 2018 achieved. It made Flipkart, and close second Amazon, too big to ignore.

 

Which explains the regulatory grenade lobbed by the Ministry of Commerce in the last few days of 2018, even as the two companies were basking in the glow of a great year, capped off by the resounding successes of their annual flagship sale events in October. Shorn of legalese, the government “clarified" that much of the way leading e-commerce platforms, including Flipkart and Amazon, were conducting business in India was illegal. 

 

And everyone had time till 1 February 2019 to remedy things.

 

If there was a silver lining in this ominous cloud, it was visible only to the hundreds of smart and expensive lawyers who knew exactly how to defuse this latest grenade as well. It was time for a new round of “e-commerce laundering.”

 

e-commerce laundering

noun

the concealment of the origins of e-commerce transactions, typically by means of transfers involving foreign entities or related businesses.

 

Indian consumer e-commerce has grown despite laws that prohibit it, because lawyers have created corporate structures that funnel sales transactions between entities so that what comes in isn’t what gets out.

 

Saif Iqbal, the contributing author of today’s fairly detailed analysis of India’s new e-commerce laws, their ostensible rationale, and their true impact, has been an experienced e-commerce executive himself. Which allows him to use deep operational know-how and category insights to explain how this pans out.

 

Hint: there’s absolutely zero operational changes thus far in response to the new laws, either at Flipkart or Amazon. But in terms of corporate structures, well, let’s just say their lawyers are already having a very busy and prosperous 2019.

Open source video editing for beginners: Kdenlive series

Open source video editing for beginners: Kdenlive series

This eBook is a video editing tutorial by independent multimedia artist Seth Kenlon. Consisting of six installments, this series introduces aspiring videographers to Kdenlive, a powerful multi-track video editor available for GNU/Linux.

https://opensource.com/resources/ebook/video-editing

PORTUGUESE CLASSES:

PORTUGUESE CLASSES: The Indo-Portuguese Friendship Society at Goa is to

hold its IXth Portuguese Conversation Courses, in Panjim and Margao, and

conducted by Profa. Ana Luisa da Rocha Martins from Braga, Portugal. The

classes will be held from January 14, 2019, to March 7, 2019, with limited

students per batch. For details, contact Margao 2702481 Panjim: 2436875 or

9552596875.

SURNAMES OF PORTGUESE ORIGIN (meaning) :

SURNAMES OF PORTGUESE ORIGIN (meaning) :

Afonso/Alfonso - Noble is ready.
Albuquerque - White Oak Tree.
Almeida - Plateau.
Ambrose - Nectar.
Andrade - Man.
Baptista - Wash.
Barboz - One who lives in bushes.
Barreto - Mud.
Benjamin - Southerner.
Botelho - A gatherer of seaweeds.
Carneiro - Sheep.
Carvalho - Oak Tree.
Cerejo - Cherry.
Coelho - Rabbit.
Colaco - Foster brother.
Conceicao - Conception.
*Correia - Leather strap*.
Costa/D’Costa - Remark.
Coutinho - Small shelter.
Crasto - Palace.
Cruz/D’Cruz - Cross.
Cunha/D’Cunha - Wedge.
Dias - Days.
Diniz - Followed
*DSouza - vegetable seller* 
Falcao - Hawk.
*Fernandes - Brave expedition*.
Ferrao - Sting.
Ferreira - Sea-bream.
Fonseca - Stream.
Fragoso/Fargose - Craggy.
*Furtado - Stolen*.
Gomes - Man.
Gonsalves - Son of Gonçalo.
Gracias - Charming.
Lemos - Elm.
Lewis - Fame war.
Lima/D’Lima - A file.
*Lobo - Wolf*.
Lopes - Wolf.
Lourenco - A town in Italy.
Luis - French gold coin.
Machado - Axe.
Martins - Roman God of war.
Mascarenhas - Umbrella.
Matias - Gift of God.
Melo/D’Mello - Black bird.
Mendes - Entire tribute.
Mendonca - A cold mountain.
*Menezes - Battlement*.
Misquitta - Mosque.
*Miranda - Lovely*.
Monserrate - A city of Spain.
Monte/D’Monte - Hill.
Monteiro - Hunter.
Morais/Moras - One who lives near
mulberry rush.
Murzello - Black colour.
Nazareth/Nazare - To guard.
Olivera - Olive tree.
Pegado - Glued.
Penha/Pen - Rock.
*Pereira - Braveheart* 
Peres/Pires - Rock.
Pimenta - Pepper.
*Pinto -   chicken*.
Po - Dust.
Rebello - A projecting strip of land.
Remedios - Remedy.
Ribeiro - Someone who lives near a river.
*Rodrigues* - Renown power. 
*Rosario -Rosary*.
Sa/D’Sa - Someone employed at a manor house.
Sales - Salty.
Silva/D’Silva/Silviera - Someone who lives in woods.
Soares - A person with a reddish hair.
Sousa/De Souza - Salt marsh.
Telles - Saddle cloth.
Tuscano - Someone from Tuscany in Italy

India's literary lilac (Roanna Gonsalves, abc.net.au)

Goa, often thought of as India's answer to Phuket
          or Bali, is also home to one of the country's most
          complex literary scenes. Roanna Gonsalves
          [roannag@gmail.com], herself of Goan heritage,
          dives in and finds a state coming to terms with its
          history and its future.

Goa has done for India what November does to the jacaranda
tree; added literary lilac, so to speak, to an otherwise
green canopy. This tiny Indian state continues to blossom,
time and again, with thoughts, words and deeds to feed the
life of the mind. Goa is one of the few places in the world
where Catholic nuns can study feminist theology, at the Mater
Dei Academy, interrogating the central, Adam's apple tenets
of the Roman Catholic Church.

          Goa is a land of many tongues, tongue roast recipes
          and tongue lashings in Konkani, Marathi, Portuguese
          and English. Goa is also my grand-motherland, where
          my grandma Philomena and her sister Umiliana grew
          up in a riverside house full of brothers and
          doctors. They probably heard the chuckle of the
          white-throated kingfisher, a distant cousin of the
          kookaburra, Goan in tooth and claw, hunting and
          breeding in local waterways. Their relatives
          studied at Goa Medical College, which some regard
          as the oldest medical college in Asia. The Nirmala
          Institute of Education has been training teachers
          for over 50 years, despite having to negotiate a
          precarious ongoing funding situation.

Yet this intellectual history, this deep commitment to
education, is erased when Goa is seen as nothing more than
froth on a big cold beer, so un-Indian, its booze so cheap,
its beaches full of white bikinis and surf-lifesavers in
Australian red and yellow, its churches so colonial. Goan
history is often considered a footnote to the history of
Mughal kings and British colonisers. After all, some
colonisers are more equal than others. The rain-in-Spain
British, for example, are considered by some to be higher-up
on the colonial ladder than, say, the naval-gazing
Portuguese.

Yet this former Portuguese colony was the first part of the
empire to bite back with political teeth; Antonio Costa, the
son of a Goan writer and freedom fighter, became the prime
minister of Portugal on 25 November, 2015, the exact
anniversary of the Portuguese conquest just over 500 years
ago. For various reasons this should not be seen as a Goan
takeover of Portugal, writes R Benedito Ferrão, but the
symbolism is thrilling.

IMAGE: TOURISM IS A HUGE BUSINESS IN GOA, BUT NOT ALL SHARE
THE BENEFITS (IAN D. KEATING, FLICKR.COM, CC-BY-2.0)

Of course, there is more to Goa than the stereotype of a
hedonistic party town that's more European than Indian. Its
architecture, for instance, presents stunning examples of
syncretic church, mosque and temple traditions, which
developed in relation to one another.

Goa is a land of many tongues, tongue roast recipes and
tongue lashings in Konkani, Marathi, Portuguese and English.
The Konkani language itself is written in at least five
different scripts -- Roman, Devanagari, Kannada, Malayalam
and Perso-Arabic.

It was in the ebb and flow of this tongue-tied landscape that
Indian print culture had its somewhat-unexpected water birth.
India's very first printing press landed in Goa in 1556, on
its way to Abyssinia, and decided to stay on Goan soil. That
first press was the placenta for the first book printed in
India, Garcia Da Orta's *Conversations on the Simples, Drugs,
and Medicinal Substances of India*, published in 1563.

It may have been accidental, but that Goan legacy of print
and publishing, although it unfolded as slowly as a new moon,
has become a beacon in the literary world. The Goan poet
Joseph Furtado, writing in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, is considered by many to be one of the finest
Indian poets of his time:

When I was young and went all day
Bird-nesting, oft would neighbours say
'Those birds will be his ruin'
'Tis not with age my hair is grey
And well might birds now turn and say
'Tis all his neighbours' doin'.'

Goa is home to some of India's best public libraries like the
Goa State Central Library in Panjim. It is home to the
writing retreats of Booker prize winners like Kiran Desai,
and writers who really should've won the Booker Prize like
Amitav Ghosh; writers' festivals like the recently concluded
Goa Arts and Literature Festival; writing groups like the Goa
Writers' Group; and the major annual publishing event on the
Indian calendar, the Publishing Next conference. The
brainchild of the Goan couple Leonard and Queenie Fernandes,
the conference is where the decision-makers of Indian and
international publishing 'come and go, talking' not just of
Michelangelo, but of the shape of the future of Indian
literature.

          In some ways, Goa has always been a place of
          comings and goings, from Mormugao Port which
          facilitates 50 million tonnes of traffic every
          year, to the hippies who flocked to Goa in the
          '70s, to the beach strip of North Goa with Russian
          signs advertising cheap rates for scooter hire. But
          while rich, lost tourists flock to Goa to find
          themselves, many Goans leave home to work in other
          parts of India and the world.

The uncompromising and sharp work of the Al-Zulaij
Collective, a group of writers documenting and analysing
various issues in contemporary Goa, point to the perilous
economic and social conditions in this 'pleasure state' that
contribute to this exodus of Goans. A recent editorial in
leading English language newspaper O Heraldo on the occasion
of the anniversary of Liberation Day asked if the idea of
liberation is a cruel joke given the circumstances of Goa's
liberation from Portuguese rule -- an armed annexation by India.

The Goan diaspora, especially in Mumbai, as well as
internationally in Portugal, East Africa, the UK, Australia,
New Zealand, Canada and the USA, has produced numerous poets
and novelists. One of the finest is Eunice De Souza, who was
also the Head of the English Department at St Xavier's
College Mumbai for many years. In her powerful poem For A
Child, Not Clever, the narrator has an epiphany about why the
strong willingly take blows for the weak.

          The Gauda, Kunbi, Velip and Dhangar people, Goa's
          tribal, Aboriginal people, are the keepers of Goa's
          ancient stories, some of which unsettle more widely
          accepted Goan origin myths. They are some of the
          poorest of the Goan poor. Their struggles are
          similar to those of the rest of the world's
          traditional custodians. They are little Davids
          using slingshots against the might of the Goliaths
          that are the Indian state and mining companies.

In Goa, you could say that public space wears a skirt with a
rising hemline. Many urban middle class women have moved here
from other parts of India because of the sense of safety.
Women can loiter in Goa in ways that we certainly can't in
Delhi, Kolkata or even Mumbai.

But, as elsewhere in India, patriarchy and the caste system,
that pair of steel capped boots, continue to trample across
Goan public and private space. As is the case elsewhere in
India, this trampling is contested in many ways by the women
of Goa: Albertina Almeida writes about feminist struggles,
including sexual harassment in Goan schools.

Neeta Torne, a Goan writer and academic, wrote a poetry
collection in Marathi and then had it translated into three
other languages -- Konkani, Hindi, and English -- publishing
them side by side in the same book. One of the poems,
Jagtana, translated as While Living, is written from the
point of view of a woman speaking to her daughter.

Savia Viegas is a writer, painter, and educator. Her work is
an unsentimental portrait of women's experiences in Goa, told
with gentle humour and arresting observation. Fatima
Noronha's work presents slices of everyday Goan life
unfolding in evocative prose. Sheela Jaywant's work narrates
the joys and challenges of living in Goa today, including in
relation to Goa's public transport system. Pamela D'Mello's
reportage chronicles stories rarely heard outside of Goa,
such as the recent protests against the suspicious death of
much-loved activist-priest Fr Bismarque Dias, and the
subsequent bungling of the criminal investigation.

IMAGE: FAMOUS FOR ITS SANDY BEACHES, GOA IS ALSO A MAJOR
CENTRE OF PUBLISHING (EUSTAQUIO SANTIMANO, Flickr.com,
CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0)

Walk around Goa today, and you'll see death and decay in many
shapes, even as this small Indian state renews itself. If you
take an aerial view, you'll see hara kiri in progress,
disembowelment by sand mining, as Vivek Menezes notes. If you
take a selfie, it'll probably feature a background of ancient
houses whose once grand foreheads are now furrowed with
neglect; their windows toothless open mouths; their fate in
the hands of the courts, where property battles are fought
between descendants who don't live in Goa anymore.

          If you take a look at the newspapers, death is also
          a booming revenue stream. It's a mark of prestige
          among the hoity-toity classes to take out expensive
          half-page and full-page newspaper ads in honour of
          ancestors long deceased. Yet where there is death
          there is life in hopeful and cynical ways. The
          exhibition of the body of St Francis Xavier -- the
          Goencho Sahib, dead centuries ago, yet revered by
          millions even today -- is a case in point.

Goa today is the fecund green of the paddy fields, the
coconut palms in the monsoon like natural wind farms, the
Mangueshi Temple, the Safa Shahouri Masjid, the white Church
of the Immaculate Conception in Panjim, with its impossibly
steep steps leading as if to Mars. The State Library of Goa
in Panjim smells on the outside of the city and all its
refuse, but on the inside it is a canopy of books, and
stories, and all that is so precious about Goa. All this
tells us what we really already know: that rather than Goa
becoming more Indian, the rest of India ought really to
become more Goan.

On the tip of a billion tongues: Goa
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Tuesday 15 December 2015
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their diversity.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/goa-indias-literary-lilac/7046166