Category: Uncategorized

Popular Essays, Uncategorized

Finally, hope in Gaza?

The new year begins well, with a ceasefire deal announced between Israel and Hamas, due to start on Sunday, 19th January 2025, and raising enormous hope of bringing the devastation in Gaza to an end. For fifteen months now, the world has watched as Israeli rockets, missiles, and ground forces hammered the territory, killing at least 46,707 Palestinians and wounding another 110,265 since October 7th, 2023, when Hamas is alleged to have instigated multiple attacks in Israel, killing 1,139. The dead till date include more than 40,000 Palestinian children, while the general destruction comprises tens of thousands of homes and public infrastructures, including schools and hospitals; the last remaining hospital in Gaza was recently pulverized and its doctors ‘disappeared’. (more…)

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Who is Vishwajit?

Whenever I meet Goans whose kids have just completed either high school or graduation, and ask about what they hoped to do now, the response is pretty standard: a government job would be best, but who can afford it? We don’t have the money to pay for a government job. (more…)

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The Goan’s Place in the World

Some years ago, while crafting the curatorial note for an exhibition of the works of Goan artists put together by the Goan printmaker Viiraj Naik, and amazed by the breadth of works represented, I was inspired to title the note, and thereby the exhibition, “Goa não é um país pequeno” (Goa is not a small place). The title was derived from the slogan coined by the Portuguese Estado Novo in the face of the anti-imperial nationalist movements that were breaking out throughout the pluri-continental Portuguese State to assert that Portugal was not simply continental Portugal, but all of the Portuguese territories spread throughout the world. The wildly decolonising world did not buy the argument then, but a curious incident about a month or so ago recently revived the memory of the Estado Novo slogan, my reuse in the Goan context, and what it could mean for the Goan’s place in the world. (more…)

Popular Essays, Uncategorized

Love in the time of love-laws

By ALBERTINA ALMEIDA

The potential of love to disrupt the status quo, in the interests of justice, is something that the courts of law, at the trial court level, need to explore, if we are to envision and bring into being an equitable world. This is all the more necessary in times, when laws are being enacted to retain the status quo, which affects the dispensation of justice. It is necessary to take stock of how love is being weaponised to maintain a stereotyping status quo, and to leverage the law and the Constitution to make sure that love becomes a medium to disrupt the conservative and unjust status quo. (more…)