WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2024
The year has passed, and we have commenced what will be one of the most significant years for our land and our people. This is a time to look back and look ahead. It is a time to look at pain and look at hope. Look back at what we have faced and what we can look forward to, it is this space between pain and hope that we are in, a journey we are undertaking. We have moved from one end and looking at the other.
And there are any pains that we live with. As brothers and sisters celebrated Christmas in a neighbouring state, goons barged into a school and questioned genteel teachers why Hindu children were being asked to celebrate; in Assam and Punjab, this hatred continued. Goans looked at these incidents with alarm. This is a pain but then this too shall pass. For every goon, there are two who have the grace to be humane. There can be the hope for a system that is humane and inclusive.
Last year, so many of our friends and relatives faced, and still face the pain of loss of their dearest ones. They look back at days and nights struggling for beds in hospitals and oxygen to flow from somewhere. They saw the pain of hundreds and thousands of people coming into Goa unchecked, they look back at different super spreader events, which were allowed. And yet they hope for a time when the system will be more responsible as well as the people in it.
People have also faced the pain of businesses shutting down, of restaurants with tables gathering dust, with salaries of staff still to be paid. The pain was quietly borne with dignity but many families, not letting others know of their financial crisis, were left wondering how they would get back to their feet. This New Year may bring such families hope. Of revival. Of a fresh start.
Our sons and daughters of the soil have faced the pain of their fields getting flooded, their bunds broken, of construction debris blocking fields. This kind of pain can never be imagined. To see the very soil created with your own hands and the crops that are born under your watch and protection, not responding to tour touch. A slow death on a farm is just like looking at a family member suffer with you still hoping for a cure because you refuse to give up. And they hope that those who grow food for us will be treated with care and compassion.
Look at our fisherfolk. The simple joys of taking a canoe or boat out, going into the deep-sea waters, singing songs, and then returning to the shore with a huge catch, with the wives waiting by the seashore to gather and clean the catch; are going away. Imagine the pain when a Goan fisherman cannot or does not want to go out to sea because the sea or even the river in front does not have fish because big trawlers with LED lights have sucked all the fish out They also have the pain of living by the sea and off the sea, but unable to catch and cook fish, and share it with neighbours. People are looking to transform this pain to hope.
There are so many things that hurt. Of homes covered with coal dust in the upper Southern coastal belt, of spillage of coal on railways tracks, of breathlessness and asthma, the pain of our mineral resources being taken away and looted even though they belong to us. But there is hope of transformation, of that pain going away. Of life getting better
And then there is the pain which is not tangible, the pain of losing land and identity, of the destruction of our land, the cutting of our hills, of the loot of our mineral resources. But then for all pains, there is hope.
It is the same hope that we feel when we pray. When we count our blessings, when we meditate and seek solace and protection, it is the same sense of hope we get.
As 2022 gets off to a start we who live on this land and love it more than our lives, let us hope for HOPE.
