MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2024
Vivek Menezes
27 long years ago in1995, along with many other curious people, I connected my telephone to my computer and dialled up to the internet for the first time. This was on Netscape Navigator, and the best search engine was AltaVista. It was analmost unimaginable opening-up. For someone like me - born in 1968 - the idea that you could search the entire World Wide Web for anything and everything, with answers spit back in seconds, was beyond mind-boggling. So, what did I look for above and beyond all else, in my initial scans of the global imaginary? It was Goa, of course. I navigated the “information superhighway” directly into Goanet, and quickly encountered Frederick Noronha.
There are some true facts the Che Guevara of Goan Cyberspace objects to my sharing in this manner, so I will limit them to this paragraph. Several people participated in birthing, fostering and safeguarding the internet’s possibilities in and for India’s smallest state, but he is indisputably first amongst those equals. The especially admirable aspect of his legacy has been its steadfast adherence to Copyleft and Open Source, and crowdsourced resources like Wikipedia, as the most appropriate solutions to our challenges. In this way, in my considered opinion, Noronha has been the crucial catalyst in how tiny Goa has always bravely punched way above its weight in the digital domain.
Here, it’s fascinating to revisit the 2011 YouTube interview (https://youtu.be/ L02FNPUXfrI) that I conducted with my childhood friend (Noronha and I exchanged books whilst growing up in 1970s Saligao) when the Indian Internet was beginning to be transformed by smartphones. He recalls that in 1995 – he was working at this newspaper – they got online by dialling Bombay after 10pm (when the rates were cheaper), and there were barely 100 of us on Herman Carneiro’s mailing list. At that time, Eddie Fernandes – another great pioneer of Goan cyberspace who created the excellent goanvoice. org.uk – visited to evangelize about the new medium: “they asked him, do you earn anything from it. He said no. Then they asked him, do you pay anything to write in it. He said no. So, they lost complete interest in it.”
Not Noronha, who persevered highly consequentially. Although none of us realized what we were doing, Goa began to reflect some of the promise of the new medium. From London, Eddie Fernandes – an expert librarian by profession – kept scouring the web to share information about the diaspora. Lisbon-based historian Prof Teotonio de Souza maintained the standard of scholarship scrupulously high. Almost all the regular contributors to that network were based in the west –understandable, because the infrastructure was more easily available – but there’s no doubt we were all hooked by the steady flow of real time news from Goa, and for many years that was theproduction of one man’s solitary late-night labours in Sonarbhat, Saligao.
Watch the even more luxuriantly moustachioed Frederick Noronha in that YouTube interview, and he’s cautiously optimistic: “I don’t have a crystal ball to gaze into, but if everyone tries hard, and we don’t have too much infighting amongst ourselves, then the future is bright. For me the touchstone is [becoming] producers rather than consumers of knowledge.” This was the real point, and by now hehad taken the further step of making it happen via the independent publishing house Goa 1556, which describes itself like so: “Launched on a rainy day (June 20, 2007), Goa, 1556 is a quest to do things differently, and with goals that are different. Our aim is to democratise the production of knowledge. In our own small, alternative way. And we strive for quality simply by laying down high standards, while actively pursuing the goal of creating space for ‘other voices’ to be heard.”
In its run of the past 15 years, Noronha and team have produced some 150 books, in an extraordinary contribution to our collective culture: Jose Pereira’s masterpiece on Mando, Robert Newman’s superb essays, Paul Melo Castro’s marvellous translations, Fatima Silva Gracias’s classic on Goan food, the list is endless and ongoing. Just last week, we were delivered Nuno Lopes’s Heritage of Defence: Goa 1510-1660, which explains how the Estado da India’s complex security infrastructure stands apart – not just in the subcontinent – for its complexity and ambition, in yet another example of truly meaningful scholarship that few of us wouldencounter ifnot for Goa 1556.
During the purposeful, productive launch of that latest book – it was at Instituto Camoes - Noronha spoke about the difficulties that have beset publishing in Goa. Via email, he later outlined how “we’re seeing a lot of platitudes and promises” regarding the promotion of book culture“but no action.” State libraries are “in a state of collapse” except for the showpieces in Patto and Navelim. There are “little to no efforts to promote reading in schools” and the state has a closed policy towards local textbook creation. Once-helpful government grants have been ill-advisedly rejigged to useless, “even simple things like getting ISBN numbers sanctioned and posting a registered article have become an uphill struggle” and the National Book Trust’s “little to no involvement hardly helps.”
Noronha told me “I don’t see this as about me or even Goa,1556. It has more to do with the book ecosystem (and building it) in Goa and how it plays out in the rest of India. As a society, we are still unable to produce the books we need, to cater to our informational needs. In the rest of India, the big cities and larger states are better off. But much of the country too isn’t producing the books it requires. Large parts of India (apart from the metros) are book deserts.Libraries have been spending huge amounts on buildings, infrastructural costs and staff salaries. But we can see very little resources of, say, scanned
copyright-expired books being made available publicly. It’s easier to get a shared, copyright expired book from Lisbon rather than from Panjim! Shame on us.”
From 1995 and 2011 to 2022, what’s the main difference, I asked Noronha. He said “Things were on the right road in those times. Book publishing was being encouraged. Smaller players were being supported to enter the market. (NBT had two super-inexpensive courses on book publishing inGoa itself in 2005 and 2012. Many now in the field got their lessons there.The library grants to authors were helpful (it has since changed for the worse, in my view, in Goa). The postal services were more operational, and one didn’tsuffer as long queues (30 to 60 minutes) for registering a single item. We got ISBN numbers without a struggle, in those pre-online days! Inflation wasn’t biting as sharply. Those taking decisions about books seemed to have an understanding about what they were doing.”
Now, unfortunately, “overall, there’s a failure to see the role Goa has played in the printing ofthe book since the mid-16th century. Itwas the first home to printing in Asia, no less. I have argued elsewhere, that the books then produced were not just religious texts, but shared critical information about plants, Asian languages and the geography of the continent. This had a crucial impact in the Europe-Asia equation, both for better and worse. We fail to see things in perspective.”
