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Showing posts with the label Goa Chitra

Goa Cruti: Salvaging the Legacy of Professions of the Past

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Goa Cruti is a new addition to Victor Hugo Gomes’ increasing number of museums showcasing Goa’s history. Earlier there was Goa Chakra, highlighting the wheel and its significance in Goan culture and history. The future looks to another museum in Betul celebrating boats and the fishing community of Goa. Victor has long been driven by his passion to salvage Goan heritage and relics of the past. He believes this is essential to create and develop a sense of responsibility among the Goan youth and to whet their thirst for knowledge of the past. Goa Cruti Museum is a totally different concept from his previous endeavours and focuses entirely on the different professions of Goa’s colonial past. ‘Cruti’ means ‘work’ and some of the areas covered are medicine and law. There is ornamental furniture, exquisite crockery, bottles, priests’ vestments, musical instruments, guns and other weapons, cameras and so on. Why are the professions of medicine and law of consequence? The reason is that they w

Preservation for Posterity

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He talks of a ‘madness’ that has driven him for years to salvage the cultural history of this verdant land called Goa. Its versatile heritage has been curated by Victor Hugo Gomes with painstaking perseverance and attention to detail. With his degrees in art and conservation, Victor has moved from village to village documenting trades that have disappeared or are slowly vanishing and has been curating a vast storehouse of Goa’s past in various symbols of her culture. It all began with excursions into forbidden areas. Always a curious child with a questioning mind, Victor would explore attics, storerooms and even the dark rooms used to punish him for misbehaviour, to find strange and intriguing items of interest like different types of clay pots, baskets, tools, old altars and wooden chests filled with clothes belonging to a bygone era. This childhood fascination for gleaning commonplace items, which have shaped Goa’s cultural history, and a questioning mind, nurtured by his grandmother

An Operawala in Goa

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Operatic singing is not a musical genre usually associated with Goa, although the state is far more steeped in Western culture than most of India. Oscar Castellino, who is performing at Goa Chitra Museum, Benaulim, on the 8th of March as part of his continuing Operawala Tour of India, brings his baritone voice to amaze and mesmerise his audience. In association with the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, Oscar, or Operawalla as he calls himself, is commemorating the centenary of composer Francesco Paolo Tosti with a concert tour of India. An alumnus of the Royal College of Music, UK, Oscar Dom Victor Castellino already has an impressive body of work with roles as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet with Opera at Bearwood; Dancairo in Carmen ; Mahival, which is a lead role, in Sohini and Mahival , an Urdu opera at the Southbank Centre and others. He is, furthermore, scheduled to play the lead as James Meredith in Kommilitonen! with Welsh National Opera young artists in July 2016. Oscar had an