Re: [GRN] Re: Fake news about Goa and Agaçaim or Agshekars

[Helga Do Rosario Gomes]

This gives me an opportunity to showcase my brilliant summer high school interns, the twins Leysha and Leonah Esteves whose father is from Agaçaim and mother from Goa Velha. 

The Esteves twins are from a beautiful and close community of Goans in a very idyllic town along the Hudson River named Peekskill. The story of Peekskill Goans, a community started by two Goan men itself is very interesting and deserves research and a writeup but more in this post of these pretty amazing twins. 

Firstly Leysha and Leonah speak Konkani fluently and have recently joined Barnard, the women’s college of Columbia Univ, one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges and the alma mater of the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the writer Jhumpa Lahiri amongst many other luminaries. 

The twins who were the valedictorian and salutatorian of their high school class of 2022 interned with Joaquim and me for two summers.

I have never seen such determination and intelligent thinking in any of my summer students. 

They developed their summer projects into full research papers that they presented at various science fairs including the Westchester science fair, one of the most competitive in New York State. 

Last summer they brought home a windfall of prizes for ‘Outstanding Projects’ including Association for Women Geoscientists Award, Creative Approach to Research Award and the 3rd place at Westchester Science Fair. Leysha also got the statewide Stockholm Junior Science Prize. 

The then Dean of Columbia University’s Climate School invited them to the awards ceremony for two renowned geophysicists and in her speech she introduced them to the audience as the next generation of earth scientists. They got a standing ovation from a huge audience of physicists, geologists and chemists who study the complexities of our planet. In the audience were their parents Basy and Nelves Esteves. It was a truly magical moment for us all especially as after the ceremony many scientists came to talk to them. 

Being a liberal arts college that gives weight to both the sciences and the arts, and encouraged by her history professor, Leonah is planning to write a research paper on Goans and migration and it surprised me that she already knew so much! 

I also love that every year the Peekskill community has a big St. Francis Xavier feast and the twins told me that they paid great attention to this year’s Konkani sermon to see how much they understood because of course Padrichi Konkani as Teotonio liked to call it isn’t easy! Then they summarized it for me. 

Mentorship is important as are role models and I hope the well established UK Goans will give their fellow Goans a helping hand. 

Best. 

Helga 

On Dec 13, 2023, at 10:38, John Nazareth <jhr_na...@hotmail.com> wrote:



I just went back to the original article written in “The Post” in New Zealand and found it a nice article.

It wasn’t purporting to be an intellectual statement of any sort. To recap:

The Portuguese planted Catholicism in Goa during several hundred years of colonial rule and Doreena, laughing, reckons this might help to explain her gustatory enthusiasms: “In Goa we are all Catholic so we eat everything, except the chairs and tables.”

The unfortunate thing is that the paper chose those words to use as a headline.

If they had chosen some other headline, people would have accepted that paragraph for what it is – hyperbole.

(It’s a bit like saying all Moidecars are “half-crack”. (NB I’m from Moira.) For me, I embrace it – I tell people that we are the only Goans who don’t have to tell a joke to make people laugh; we just say we are from Moira and they laugh.)

Don’t spoil an otherwise nice article. For once Goans have got noticed in New Zealand.

There will be time to educate them more fully.

(On the other hand, I have tried to convince others that people from Moira are real very smart, but they keep on telling me now we “fertilized” the foundations of the church to make it grow… Ah well….)

John Naz

 

From: goa-rese...@googlegroups.com <goa-rese...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Joao Paulo Cota
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 6:23 PM
To: Goa-Research-Net <goa-rese...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [GRN] Re: Fake news about Goa

 

Fred,

These are not assumptions, these are facts.

There is a place in the UK called Swindon where for some reason, most of the Goan population there originate from these two specific villages - Siridao and Agacaim. It is like entire villages are teleported here. 

They also bring in their age old feuds and other maladies here. They were neighbours in Goa and they choose to be neighbours here... totally absurd.

Even the local British police now know every single Konkani bad word, wish you could see the street fights these Goan people have here... similar to the widely uneducated Portuguese emigrants from the country side and the islands, who pickup fights amongst themselves after a few drinks during Portugal day (the venue gets changed regularly due to the local authorities banning them from their land).

These Goans are mostly uneducated folk, who come here and only tarnish the good Goan image that existed for a long time. Their kids, who are supposedly more educated, even take their own parents to court in case they get shouted at or smacked. So the parents have no control of themselves leave along of their very own kids.

Some kids even claimed that they have forgotten Konkani after a year or so and claim they are British now!

Nothing to do with professions, purely manners and education.

They are absolutely raw.

Similar kind of pattern of Goan migration to Australia and New Zealand, it is all about education. Not class based comments.

These new 'Portuguese passport emigrants' don't represent the vast majority of Catholics settled here in the UK who are quite educated, had been here for decades and have integrated into the general society. The former live in a gheto kind of style, hence the problem... 

I have nothing against them personally, but many Goans here in central London and elsewhere distance themselves from these two villages' citizens. They are an embarrassment, specially when the local press publishes articles about problems and issues with that Goan community, everybody gets painted by the same brush...

They are entitled to their opinions, no problem there, but these opinions are not representative of the vast Goan majority here.

That is why they get the statistics all wrong, yet, they are taken at face value, which shouldn't be the case.

The Kiwi reporter should had done a better job, had they been to a proper journalist course - one has to validate data given. Hence he/she must be some local farmer lad who just got a job as a journalist and did not do their homework before publishing.

Hope you understand my point.

JP

 

 

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From: goa-rese...@googlegroups.com <goa-rese...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of fredericknoronha <frederic...@gmail.com>
Sent: 12 December 2023 22:33
To: Goa-Research-Net <goa-rese...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [GRN] Re: Fake news about Goa

 

I don't agree with this class-based slur against the people of "Siridao and Agacaim". On what basis?  

 

That they may be sons and daughters of the soil, and less burdened with the overload of a formal education and "knowledge"? Or that they are more recent migrants to the Western world, including NZ, maybe lower down on the pecking ladder? And then, what do we have against "Kiwi farmer background reporters"? Either they do their job well, or they don't. Background is immaterial here. Besides this, the current crisis in the media makes people do strange things too! Click-bait headlines is just one of these.

 

So, I don't agree with you, João Paulo. 

 

Let us not forget that even supposedly educated Catholic migrants to East Africa often believed that "Goa is Catholic". In their case, the only "excuse" they had was that the Goan diaspora in that part of the world (definitely till the 1960s) was 99% Catholic... and that is all they saw.   Nobody has a monopoly over being ill-informed. Or even not wanting to let the facts come in the way of a good story and/or headline.

FN

On Wednesday 13 December 2023 at 03:52:11 UTC+5:30 Joao Paulo Cota wrote:

When village people, possibly Siridao and Agacaim meetup with Kiwi farmer background reporters, this is the result.

Sheer ignorance.

That expression probably originates around China, where, when I was once on a teaching assignment at Shanghai, I was told at a dinner that 'the only thing the Chinese do not eat with four legs are the tables'.

The only consolation is that that newspaper has a microscopic circulation and most of them must had been recycled on their fish and chips takeaways.

Worth writing to the editor to correct the statistics though...  before it is cloned elsewhere on another website... and then becomes a 'fact'. 

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