Category: Popular Essays

Popular Essays

What’s new in a new Temple?

By AMITA KANEKAR

A new temple is announced. Thanks to the recently-delivered Supreme Court verdict in the Babri Masjid land dispute case, it looks like we – in a land short of many things, but definitely not new Hindu temples – are going to get a new temple, the grandest of them all, on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid. The judgement has seen strong reactions, with some raising the legal issue of how the same judgement which declares the demolition of Babri Masjid by a mob in 1993 as illegal could reward the perpetrators (or their instigators) with the land, instead of trying to undo their crime; and others criticising the historical argument in the judgement that the site has always been believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu diety Ram, for using very questionable sources. (more…)

Popular Essays

Perceptions of Justice and the Road to Justice

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

Questioning the meaning of justice and what sense it makes happens every day, based on ordinary people’s lived experiences of the justice system. The Judgement on the Ayodhya issue has only brought the issue in sharp limelight. The concluding words in a book titled Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael J. Sandel are reverberating in my mind, “A politics of moral engagement, is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society.” (more…)

Popular Essays

Misplaced Priorities: Profit at the Expense of Goa

By DALE LUIS MENEZES

Of all the misplaced priorities of successive Goan governments, the most recent is the Vibrant Goa summit. The summit aimed to attract investment in the areas of pharma, tourism, IT, and real estate. Even a cursory glance at the industries that the Goan government is promoting should make the alarm bells ring. For it is precisely these industries and their unregulated promotion that causes economic, social, and cultural problems in Goa. (more…)

Popular Essays

Of Human Rights and Indian Values

By AMITA KANEKAR

There is a tourist hostel in Anjuna called Prison, which also calls itself a party hostel. Because, what better place to party then a prison? At Prison, so one hears, guests are called inmates, have to change into striped clothes and get their mug-shots photographed with boards mentioning their names, get locked up in their rooms by staff dressed like security guards, sleep on metal bunk beds, and so on. All for fun, of course. Fun for those with money to burn, and a need for new thrills – because just beaches, coconut trees, and cheap alcohol can get boring – not to mention the conviction that they will never really be imprisoned themselves. (more…)

Popular Essays

Stop Son Preference in Laws and Their Implementation!

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

At a recently held state-level training programme on the Pre-Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques  (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, social circumstances that drive the ‘son preference’ were factored as responsible for the adverse sex ratio. It is to be noted that Goa’s child sex ratio, according to the last census of 2011, stands at 942 females per 1000 males. It would seem that the son preference even informs law making, law implementation, law interpretation, or omission in synchronizing new laws with relatively progressive past laws. There are umpteen examples that can be given to illustrate this problem. (more…)

Popular Essays

Identity and Belonging in India

By DALE LUIS MENEZES

As it happens now and then, papers published in reputed scientific journals receive media attention because the findings impact politics. Last month, two papers published in Cell and Science reopened debates about the origins of Indian civilization and consequently the cultural identity and belonging of contemporary Indians. The bone of contention was the ‘Aryan migration’ theory. In other words, the debate was whether Indian culture was indigenous or a result of foreign influence thousands of years ago. Surprisingly, while the written, peer-reviewed papers did not dispute the said migration theory, two of the authors, in a press conference, claimed otherwise. As embarrassing as the contradictory statements were for the professional reputation of the scholars, the incident also suggests the misuse of history and archaeology for political gains. (more…)

Popular Essays

Swachh doesn’t mean Clean!

By AMITA KANEKAR

In a month which sees Modi feted for the Swachh Bharat Mission, a newly-appointed sweeper working for the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) was hauled up by her superiors for covering her nose with her own scarf while sweeping – because it shows, they said, that she is not serious about her job. (more…)

Popular Essays

Era Uma Vez, Or What Could Have Been

By DALE LUIS MENEZES

 

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

The late Paulo Varela Gomes, former delegate of the Fundação Oriente in Goa and an architectural historian, always emphasized Goa’s difference, and thus uniqueness. In his crucial intervention in the debates on Goan church architecture, Whitewash, Red Stone (2011), he emphasizes that rather than interpreting church architecture in Goa as Portuguese-European or Indian, Goan architecture is simply Goan. A few years before his untimely demise from cancer, Gomes turned to write fiction and memoirs. In one of these works, a novel titled Era uma vez em Goa (2015, Once Upon a Time in Goa), Gomes returns to his obsession of Goa as different, as unique. (more…)

Popular Essays

The Politics of Loss

By AMITA KANEKAR

Don’t politicise the floods; the people won’t forgive you. This was the warning of the Maharashtra Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, to opposition parties, even as the death toll in the monsoons reached 49 in Maharashtra and nearly 250 across the country. (more…)