Prutha Goa

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

The names ascribed to Goa of the ancient times are myriad, and suitably signify the lush greenery one naturally identifies with the tiny state. Gomanta, Gomanchala, Goparashtra, Govapuri and Gomantak are a few which occur in the Mahabharata, Skanda and other Puranas. The syllable ‘Go’ that occurs consistently in all the names is Sanskrit for cow. The Mahabharata also refers to Goa as Govarashtra and Goparashtra. Both mean ‘the district of cowherds or nomadic tribes’ and indicate the pastoral life led by the Aryans who first settled here. Gopakapattana and Gopakapuri can be found in Harivansa and the Skanda Purana, ancient Hindu texts. Ptolemy mentions that in the third century B.C. Goa was known as Aparanta. Epigraphical evidence points to Goa’s trade relations with the ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians and Greeks. Goa may be the Gubi mentioned in the records of Gudea (2143-2124 B.C.), the ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Lagesh. In the Middle Ages, Goa was called Kuve or Kuwa by Arab

Shirley Louise Gonsalves’ book The Luso-Indian Stethoscope delves into the history of having Luso-Indians, mainly Christians, play a prominent role as medical professionals in the 19th century in India. The non-fiction book is an academic read, and rightly enough, since the research undertaken for the tome was part of the author’s study as a postgraduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Dept of History, University of London. Shirley Gonsalves provides an understanding of how terms such as race, caste, religion, etc may have held different meanings at various points of time and the effect these differences had on the willingness of people to identify themselves or not with a particular identity group. Broadly categorised, Luso-Indians were indigenous people from the Konkan region whose ancestors had been ruled by the Portuguese and converted to Catholicism. The book talks about clearer definitions for terms such as caste, race, religion, and so on being introduced

Soaring Spirit is Valmiki Faleiro’s second individual venture in writing a book. His collaborative works have been many. One of them is In Black and White . Here he contributed two stories to a collection of insider experiences penned by various other journalists. But his much praised pièce de résistance remains Patriotism in Action , the first book authored by him. A well-known former working journalist, Valmiki Faleiro was employed by the defunct West Coast Times and was the Goa correspondent for national newspapers such as the Indian Express . He has contributed as a freelance journalist to The Navhind Times , Goa Today and other publications too. Feeling disillusioned by prevailing conditions in the field of journalism, he started a successful business of real estate, and from 1985 to 1987 was the municipal president of Margão. He returned to writing in 2005, with his Sunday column 'All n Sundry' in   oHeraldo . In 2009, he decided to take up full-time writing. To unde