Team Herald
MARGAO: Senior advocate and former MLA Radharao Gracias announced that he is making his debut as an author and that his first fiction book will be launched this week while he will release two more books in the near future, a compilation of essays and then a series of short stories.
While addressing mediapersons, here, Adv Gracias said his book titled ‘A Shortcut to Tipperary’, which has been published by Broadway will be released on Saturday, August 27, at Ravindra Bhavan, Margao, at 4.30 pm.
“As someone who has been in the thick of the struggle to maintain our socio-cultural and linguistic identity, down the decades, I feel lost as the emerging situation overwhelms us. So, for me, it is a farewell to activism and politics as I move into new avenues,” Gracias said.
Pointing out that he had taken the opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic to write the book, he said the novel is his attempt to recreate the fast-disappearing lifestyle of his teenage years in Goa during the 1960s and 70s.
He added that he has made a conscious effort to recreate life in a rural setting as accurately as he could.
“The narrative is fictional with one or two actual events meshed and merged into it. I have taken recourse to the literary genre of magic realism and borrowed facets of the popular Goan ‘teatro’ to convey my message,” Gracias said.
“The novel begins in Bombay among Goan immigrants and travels to Goa where most of the action takes place in the villages of Majorda, Betalbatim and Nuvem. The novel ends with the protagonist finally migrating to Ireland, reflecting real life in Goa as people seem to have lost faith in the system and prefer to make a new beginning abroad,” he added.
