Migration! Portuguese Passport! The new buzz word amongst our Goans. Asked, and if your reply is that you haven’t thought of it yet, you run the chance of being scoffed at, almost ridiculed. How could you not think of migrating? Don’t you want your children to have a better life and a bright future? What’s left in Goa? These are questions that will make anyone scramble to the immigration offices or to agents (sometimes unscrupulous) who assist with immigration formalities.
But allow me to tell you what’s left in Goa. Empty houses and barren fields! That’s the stark reality. Homes that were built on the sweat and blood of our ancestors, fields that were once painstakingly cultivated (manually in those days) and which provided our parents and grandparents and their parents a square meal, are now, all but a forgotten dream. The idea of having to be westward bound for a better life is ingrained in the minds of our children from a very early age. Parents take great pride in announcing that their child or children have migrated, but will often refrain from telling you how lonely and uncared for they feel. Goans for that matter, like many others have been smitten by the bug of migration, all for the sake of a so-called better life! On their way out, and in order to show sufficient funds, ancestral homes are being sold without a shred of guilt and farm lands are abandoned. The immigrants or the new age Goans, as I would like to call them, waste no time in introducing and enforcing their cultures and traditions, by and large leading to the erosion of many a Goan customs and age old traditions.
The general population today has redefined self-sufficiency as being able to walk into a grocery store or shopping mall and stock up on food, some of which might have been imported from distant lands. Our younger generation shows no interest in farming and cultivating as it is considered a thing of the past. It is portrayed as being non-lucrative and involving a lot of hard work. A farmer, in the minds of our young is someone who appears only in story books, sadly.
If everyone were to pursue white collar jobs, the big question is where is the food we consume going to come from? Certain countries spend millions of dollars, importing food from other countries which are in turn sold at exorbitant prices in supermarkets and grocery stores. The general population is ignorant about this fact, for as long as the food is available on the shelves and can be purchased, it gives one a notion of being self-sufficient.
What will happen when food is scarce? In the midst of our daily struggle for survival, have we given a thought to the most important question on what the future of food is going to be? As per recent estimates, an average human being, by the year 2050 might not have a square meal a day. This will lead to a war of a different kind. A war for food! This sounds ridiculous, almost surreal, but this is no ordinary joke and the war for food is just about, round the corner.
Fellow Goans, how do we tackle such a problem? The answer is simple! Start cultivating your fields. Today with the help of modern technology, farming is a lot easier and not all that pains taking. Of what good will our wealth and so called better life be, if we are unable to feed our families. As the title of this article says, ‘Come back Elisa, Come back John’, this is a call to all our fellow Goans who have migrated to distant lands. While you refer to those distant lands as your home, I hope you remember the old adage ‘home is where the heart is’.
