‘Goemkarponn’ is just a fad..! It’s just a farce. Yes, there you go, I just said that! And anyone is free to judge me all they want.
The day we shed our pseudo-patriotism and our pathetically warped sense of identity is when true ‘Goemkarponn’ will come to the fore. What the hell are we harping about? A culture of egotistically-driven ideologies and a bogus sense of superiority over other beings? Oh bollocks! We keep complaining and nagging about our jobs going to outsiders and about people from elsewhere coming and making a living here. But how many of our Goan unemployed youngsters would accept a blue-collared job?
I’m not generalising, but most of us have no dignity of labour. We only look for the cream; for the white-collared jobs that would give us a false sense of pride. It is utterly despicable! I know of youngsters who would rather sit around at village corners, chatting and talking about everything that is going wrong with the world and indulging in talks about how the ‘ghantis’ have taken over, but they won’t get up and go take a job that would get them an honorable living. Our fellows directly need jobs that pay them high salaries that can support their extravagant and flamboyant lifestyles. We don’t want to get dirt under our finger-nails.
Obviously from the employer’s point of view they may not be able to provide such remunerations that our ‘Goemkar pobre fidalgos’ demand. And when a migrant or an outsider takes up the job for the offered salary then we pseudo-Goemkars have a problem. At this juncture I shall not shy away from admitting that for quite a while I was a part of such kind of people; unemployed and whiling away my time without a productive mindset. But time has taught me very well and I managed to absorb the lesson with a big pinch of salt.
In order to reclaim our identity as Goemkar we need to begin with adopting a genuine sense of dignity of labor. We need to know how to clean up our own rubbish! For instance, how many Goan unemployed and unskilled youth would take up a job of a garbage collector? 9 out of 10 unemployed Goans would look down upon the job and say that this job is below their dignity and that such jobs are meant for only ‘ghatis’. And the hypocritical part is when a ‘ghanti’ takes that job these same people who rejected the job will crib and cry about how the Government is hoarding outsiders. What I gave here is just an example in order to put things in perspective. There are many such instances that come to mind.
Today what we are trying to protect is something that we don’t have complete understanding about. We hail and dance about our uniqueness of being “Goemkar” but somewhere down the road we have lost the meaning of our existence. And while we are pretending to display our integrity towards our state, others are making productive use of the same time that we ‘Goemkars’ are wasting, and these others are comfortably making a living of the same jobs that if we had modestly accepted would have remained ours.
Before I conclude, again I say, judge me all you want, condemn me with all your might, call me names, feel free to abuse me if you may, but my opinion here doesn’t budge – Today the ‘goemkarponn’ that we talk and harp about is only a fad…!
And unless we shed our monumentally gargantuan egos, that is what it will remain – ONLY A FAD..!!
