As we ask Siri on Iphone to teach us how to bake a cake or send creative new year greetings to a Whats group of lovers of Shakespeare’s villains, we are switching on our ACs at home as we drive back from work with a touch of an app on our mobiles, our shrinking world is shrinking further as travel agents and holiday brochures give way to being there, even before taking off.
But progress has its pitfalls. 2016 has seen Goa morph itself into a different idea of a Goa we knew, a creature which is alien, so alien that even Iphone’s Siri doesn’t know where to look. On the other hand, we are mere mortals. While we struggle to believe that this is still the best place to live in this country, the best home to come to, the best soil to raise our children, the questions we ask is why is our faith waning and yet we live in denial. It is so hurtfully ironical. Even as we link to a global bandwith in spirit, we see emptiness. To know what emptiness is, go to a church in Siridao, Goa Velha and Agassaim on a Sunday. It’s full of the aged, living from wire transfer to wire transfer from their children abroad. The money arrives but the children don’t, most having left the land, to look for El Dorado. The land of opportunity is elsewhere, not home. As organisations like the ‘Investment Promotion Board’ the one point pit stop for the powerful to get their land for their businesses and factories at the cost of locals, in the name of jobs, can we ask, will projects coming in through IPB, bring the sons and daughters who send wire transfers to their parents in Siridao, back home?
Will Siri or Ask Google tell us why those who worked on their land for generations and cultivated them, their only asset and their lifeline for the future, no longer find themselves as stakeholders, either on their land or in projects which take away their land- projects like the Golf course and villa project in Tiracol or the Mopa airport.
Will we ever know why we still pay to get jobs, or get sanctions for minor repairs or a license, as we watch Goa get sold piece by piece?
Why oh why is Goa a land, once upon a time altered and isolated beautifully making the world come here for her charm, now no different from anywhere else.
Yes we are having a tryst with destiny, a destiny we have defined for ourselves but not with distinction. We have not learnt lessons. In 2017, we will routinely exercise our franchise again, And routinely, we will once again, instead of being agents of change, be puppets of consistent mediocrity. Change, is not about bringing another party to power. Change is redefining Goa and delivering a better, just progressive and people centric Goa to ourselves.
Ultimately, we are letting a land slip into a zone of alienation, a zone so far away that when our children return home – if they do – as the Ancient mariner did in Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, they will never ever say the words of the Ancient Mariner
Oh! Dream of joy! Is this indeedThe light-house top I see?
Is this the hill?
Is this the kirk (church)?
Is this mine own countree?
Is Goa, mine own country? Is it yours and your children’s, the way it always was?
To get it all back, a herculean will in each of us has to be reawakened to get the music going again. As we say bye bye ’16, going on ’17, we don’t quite hear the sound of music, even as the crackers and the fireworks go off at the stroke of midnight.
