Reckless slaughter, day after day
If there was a law against cruelty to the inanimate, then many of you reading this would be implicated and deservedly facing trial or a sentence, for what you do to Goa’s beaches daily.
And those who don’t should have a bigger guilt around your necks, an albatross in the form of a mammoth bag of rubbish, for being complicit in the crime, for looking on, and looking away as every beach, especially the “grand slam” ones of Candolim, Sinquerim, Baga and Calangute, becomes a victim, of the colossal amount of mixed garbage, bottles, glasses and virtually anything that remains after bouts of daily consumption.
If this is murder, then locals and tourists, outsiders, insiders and bystanders and above all this government and its tourism ministers and each one of us is a Jack the Ripper, the unnamed serial killer of Whitechapel, London.
Our campaign doesn’t aim to grapple with what is so casually dismissed even by this government as a “garbage problem”. It is simpler yet more focused. The damage that the daily, consistent, incessant dumping and burning has done is irreparable. Mixed garbage of households, hotels and restaurant waste has seeped into the sand, sewage has mixed with underground water to contaminate wells and the rivers and nullahs, including river Nerul are clogged with garbage flung from cars and two-wheelers.
Above all, the government and its Tourism Minister who can’t wait to jump on a plane as soon as he gets off one, passport in one hand is guilty of these specifics — door to door collection, segregation and an effective bin management system. Every solution seems to be big, time consuming and chained to tedious processes. There are 1.22 lakh square meters of land in Calangute. While it waits for a German style waste management plant, it can’t send trucks daily to the beaches, and have a cleaning force that sorts and bring it to the dump for simple vermin composting.
There is garbage beneath the sand and under the rocks, it’s on the sand and spills over to parking lots and promenades as our picture package shows.
So what does this “The war on beach garbage” entail. It will be a people-led campaign, for we still believe that there are those who refuse to look away is first instill shock so that you know how the beaches have been killed, explain the nature and extent of the damage, be watch dogs to capture every act of this killing through pictures and above all constantly park solutions for authorities to act upon.
This war has to be fought on the streets and on social media. We will have a special page on Facebook, a Twitter hash tag through which all of you can connect.
It’s a way we need to jointly fight, in stages, moving from the big four to other beaches in the North and then coming down to Panjim and moving South.
And what will drive us. The stench that confronts us, the glass bottles that cut us, the indifference of the government that rules us and above all the fear that when we don’t have the beaches, we don’t have Goa. If this doesn’t move you, you have no right to be here.
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Only if Manohar had a Matanhy
As Narendra Modi lost Gopinath Munde, Manohar Parrikar remembered his friend and confidant Matanhy Saldhana, who may well have changed the course of this government if his life wasn’t cut short within a fortnight of him being sworn in and inducted into the Parrikar cabinet.
Parrikar had just begun a glorious innings as Chief Minister when Matanhy went, with a weeping Chief Minister by his side as he took his last breaths in the car to the hospital. And then the Chief Minister personally led the funeral arrangements and in a sea of black, he stood out in his trademark light sleeveless shirt not trucked in.
On the day Munde was lost to Prime Minister Modi, it’s important to draw this comparison, even if it is to benchmark whether Matanhy’s friendship and loyalty to Parrikar and above all his legacy has been embraced to last longer, much longer than funeral speeches of remembrance and sorrow. The embers of the fire of hope that burnt as Matanhy joined the cabinet have grown cold with two years of deviation from his path, with fragments of broken promises scattered on the landscape of Cortalim and South Goa.
The biggest disappointment has been his widow Alina Saldhana, who chose silence and inaction as a protective ring to cover her incompetency and indecision in taking Matanhy’s beliefs ahead. Matanhy’s beliefs did not ride on a car with a red beacon but on the hopes of thousands of foot soldiers who backed Matanhy the man, not the minister. And Matanhy rode on this faith and perhaps hopes as he breathed his last, that Alinha would take over.
If truth be told, Matanhy’s closest supporters, who walked the talk and fought the fight, cheek by jowl have a tough life. In dark and desolate corners they say sorry to their comrade, for a Mopa airport that lurks, for a Regional Plan that shows no sign of lurking anywhere, for farmlands converted, for orchards seized, for hills that are cut and above all for legacy whose death hurts more than his.
Over the last twenty four months, they have stepped aside and away from Alina, in a quiet dignified manner because, even though a lot is gone, she remains a Saldhana, who was wife of Matanhy Saldhana. Goa unfortunately doesn’t quite realise what Matanhy’s loss has been because you can’t measure it in tangible terms. But when all is quiet, and the Church bells stop ringing and the calm and stillness of the night lingers over the villages of the South, you sometimes comprehend what Matanhy would have meant to this government. A voice of reason, a voice of opposition, a voice of anger, a voice of correctness, a voice of vision and above all, a voice of Goa.
Even the Chief Minister, hopefully will concede that even in a situation where he rules and decides without opposition or argument, a devil’s advocate and an honest critic helps. Matanhy, many would argue, would be anti-industry and development. But there would always be a Parrikar to offest that. All Matanhy would have done was that for every stroke of a pen which signed off land without guaranteeing livelihood, Matanhy would point to the last man at the end of the last mile and ask, ‘Have we taken care of him’? Today, are these questions asked, does the lowest common denominator have a place, can the commoner sit with the Prince on the high table and above all are the ordinary people of Goa a part of the larger plan, always and every time? While it may still happen, Matanhy would make it happen, always and every time.
While Parrikar’s love for Matanhy was genuine and he does miss him, the comrade may have actually helped Parrikar service his mandate much better than he is doing right now.
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