It’s all quite different in Vasco. Perhaps it has
something to do with the water they drink or the air they breathe in. That
difference manifests itself in the carnival.
The Vasco carnival has the Queen Momo for Vasco, the Navy Band and the
tradition of Alvarado Band.
If you
haven’t noticed yet, Vasco is the only place to have a Carnival Queen standing
beside King Momo. The tradition has been going on for ten years and it was a
collective decision of the committee. The committee felt the need to be little
different than the rest of the cities. A bit like the cherry on the top that
makes a cake look perfect. It was felt a queen standing beside a king would
make the Carnival look attractive. The committee had requested the Tourism
department ten years ago to have their own Queen for the Vasco Carnival. This
year, Yvonne Magaret Pereira was chosen as Queen Momo. She was selected based
on the criteria of her education, activity participation, height, intelligence
and beauty. “I feel happy, because it had always been my dream to be on one of the
floats for carnival and here I was directly selected as the queen. It came to
me as a shock but I was excited at the same time. The entire feel of being on a
float is so different, you high above and you can see everyone else waving at
you, and it was not only an honour but a sense of love that I felt from my
Goans”, says Yvonne a young girl who won the opportunity of being the queen for
the Vasco Carnival.
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Apart from this, only Vasco has a special
Navy Band float that performs a small act along with March-pass. The Alvarado a
band tradition is added glitter to the entire carnival at Vasco. According to
Angelo Nunes, the General Secretary of the Vasco Carnival Committee, Alvarado
was a band that used to play early morning roaming around the streets of Vasco.
The people in the villages always had a good beginning to their day, before the
carnival in the evening. However, Alvarado band seemed to have disappeared
years ago and since then the tradition was discontinued. People are still on
the lookout for this wondrous band.
Angelo Nunes states, “This year the
functioning was much better with the set up and everything else, yet the only
pain was the time restrictions. People normally have the habit of walking in
late during the limelight of the event, and since it is on a working day
(Monday), people came in late to which we had to prolong the time till 10.00 pm
but aren’t allowed to. Hence the time restriction, otherwise everything was fine”
