TambdiMati

Sonia Faleiro is busy autographing her new book titled, ‘Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars’.

She is all excited about her new book as it is not only her first non-fiction work but also a product born out of five year’s of research.

While speaking about the book she confesses that it was the journalist within her that made this book possible. “I thought of writing on bar girls when the Maharashtra government banned around 1500 bars. The result was that 75,000 bar dancers were left unemployed. In those days I used to work for the Tehelka magazine in Mumbai” states Sonia who believes this ban was uncalled for, under the name of morality.

Sonia’s book is a narrative non-fiction about a charismatic bar dancer named Leela and many like her. Sonia spent three years visiting these places and two years writing about them. She confirmed that by banning these bars the state government took away the economic freedom and safety of these bar dancers.

She also confirmed that the main and primary source of income for these bar dancers was dancing. “I observed at these dance bars the guys were not allowed to talk or interact with these dancers. These young girls, dressed like Bollywood stars, only danced. If any of them worked as sex workers, it was out of their own choice. The percentage of dance bar girls working as sex workers was small,” confirms Sonia.

When asked whether it was difficult for her to interact with these girls, Sonia explains that they accepted her quite easily – “They were aware that I was writing about them. But, they still allowed me into their world because I am non-judgmental, honest.”

Sonia also had to maintain balance as she made a point without getting carried away. “Yes, I had to maintain that balance as sometimes I used to feel helpless and couldn’t change anything. But, then it is a common problem journalists’ face. There is a huge gap between our lives and that of the people we interact with or interview,” laments Sonia who has fulfilled her role and now also hopes that her writing will help bridge this gap.

Read the rest of this article at NT.

Via Goa Research Net

Scholars, lovers of literature, history buffs and die-hard lovers of Goa were treated to a wonderful evening of roundtable discussions to launch the new book Parts of Asia at the King Juan Carlos Center for Spanish and Portuguese Studies, at New York University.

The meeting was hosted with much warmth and Portuguese hospitality by Prof. Cristiana Bastos, a Michael Teague Visiting Professor at Brown University and a social scientist at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Parts of Asia, which Dr. Bastos describes as Beyond Lusotopic Nostalgia, consists of historical, sociological, and anthropological interpretations, ethnographic depictions, political analysis, literary and film criticism; as well as poetry, literature, memoirs, and introspective essays that together should draw attention once again to Portugal’s scattered colonial holdings that stretched from the Gulf of Hormuz to the Sea of Japan.

Contributors to Parts of Asia include noted historians, anthropologists, social scientists, writers, literary critics and art historians, among them Teotonio de Souza, Timothy Walker, Jayesh Needham, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, Angela Barreto Xavier, Paulo Melo e Castro, Christopher Larkosh, Joanna Passos, Claudia Pereira, and Carla Alferes Pinto.

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Previous chapters, and a description of this vital, strangely overlooked book here.

The English verb to be must do for more than one meaning.

I do not mean this as in metaphysics, where the concept of being is said to be transcendental because it applies to everything but in different ways. I speak of words, not concepts. In Portuguese there are two verbs which English must render by the same. When Mario de Sa-Carneiro says:

Eu nao sou eu nem sou o outro
Sou qualquer coisa de intermedio

I translate:

I am not I nor am I the other I am something in between

but if conversely I say that someone has a certain way of being that does not automatically translate into: ‘tern uma certa maneira de ser’ because I may happen to mean ‘uma certa maneira de estar’.

When picking up a phone that is ringing I have heard people say: Esta? by which they presumably mean: Are you, is anyone there?

Estar means to be there, it implies a certain relation to situations, moments, conditions, a surrounding world of space and time, a circumstance.

We also say: ‘the weather is fine’ but ‘o tempo esta born’ or ‘Iindo’ because the weather is a combination of space and time and all sorts of conditions.

In a somewhat modified sense ‘being there’ is said to be a particular mode of being, the human mode. The animal’s mode also, one might say. In fact the animal may even be imagined in this respect to have a certain advantage over us.

The animal is wholly there, its senses are totally attuned to the surrounding world. We humans are not always there, are we? We wander, we are anxious, we look before and after. We know and question our knowing. We are capable of calling ourselves into question. But in our questioning things come to light, we ourselves come into being.

This being so, I speak of a certain way of being there as I explore the problematic character of a particular human being’s relationship to his circumstance. ‘There’, of course, is the world of space and time and in a certain manner the questioner himself.

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by Zac O’Yeah.

Somehow, Goa had been filed away at the back of my mind as the quintessential tourist spot with its hippies, who still hope that The Beatles are going to reunite for one last gig in Anjuna, with George Harrison and John Lennon playing the Ouija board.

And its beaches, where shacks innovate in permutations of German, British, Swedish, Italian, Israeli and French cuisines, and also, of course, due to the fact that it was recently used as a backdrop by Hollywood as the perfect hideaway for Matt Damon in the thriller, Bourne Supremacy.

Simply, a place for going underground, letting loose and getting tight.

But I had to rethink my preconceived notions when I heard of a mysterious migratory trend. Somebody mentioned that my favourite author, Amitav Ghosh, had moved there and that many of the other writers I find interesting, from Sudhir Kakar to Sunil Khilnani, have homes in Goa.

When an old Mumbai acquaintance, children’s writer Rahul Srivastava, bought a lovely flat overlooking the Mandovi river at a fraction of the Mumbai rates, I realized that I had to go and find out what was going on.

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The Kosambi whom historians know well is D.D., the brilliant iconoclastic scholar who brought about a fundamental change in the writing of ancient Indian history and who, ironically, himself acquired an iconic status in Marxist historiography.

But this book is about another, less-known Kosambi, D.D.’s father, Dharmanand (1876-1947). And the editor-translator is yet another Kosambi — Meera, eminent sociologist, daughter of D.D. and granddaughter of Dharmanand.

Given the fact that Dharmanand was a grandfather whom she did not know, the book no doubt represents an important personal journey for her.

For the reader, what lends it importance and interest is the remarkable life of its protagonist, and his amazing life-journey, which took him from a small Goan village to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Russia, the United States of America and back. Not a bad record for a man who was afraid to travel!

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Goa Masala is a book of stories and memoirs written by Goans now living in Canada, and  contains 41 pieces by 33 writers.

The book will be featured in a History Hour presentation scheduled at Porvorim’s Xavier Centre for Historical Research on October 28, 2010 (Thursday)
at 5.30 pm.

Dan Driscoll, a Canadian domiciled in Goa for the past 25 years, (and part of the content team at tambdimati: the Goa review) will comment on his experiences of reading aloud for his bedridden (Goan) wife all the pieces in Goa Masala, with initial emphasis on the biodata of its contributors.

Mr Driscoll, a veteran English Literature teacher and theatre performer, will venture his own choice of favourites for reading — Joan DoRosario’s ‘The Arranged Marriage’, Al Lobo’s ‘Juringa ‘cat-astrophe’, George Pereira’s ‘Why I Miss Zanzibar’ and Alex Rodrigues’ ‘The Hatbox’.

From the back cover:

Manohar Shetty’s poems are pure delight, so much so that, because you want the pleasure to last, you read them slowly, one at a time, taking a mental walk after each. A spare richness marked his poems from the start and over the decades, this hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the poems are even more burnished than before. They glow and continue to do so long after the page has been turned, the book returned to the shelf. For those who still remember typewriters, how many would have made the connection between its keys and the seats of an/ Empty stadium. Or seeing a honeybee been reminded of a billiard ball/Ricocheting aimlessly. Occasionally, the glow of Shetty’s poems comes from an unflinching acceptance of the changes wrought by the passage of time, as when in ‘Termite’, he opens the closet and sees in the mirror both the lofty/Temples and rakish cleft he recognizes as his but also the Tunnels of mud made by termites: That’s you now: must/ Dryrot and sawdust. This is poetry so naturally memorable that you don’t need to consciously memorize it.

– Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Publisher: Doosra Press, G-4 La Marvel, Dona Paula, doosrapress@gmail.com

Price: Rs 250 (India), $10

The entire team at tambdimati: the Goa review extends a warm welcome to Paul Melo Castro, newest member of our Editorial Board.

I came to looking at Goan writing in Portuguese via quite a tortuous route.

The main focus of my research is contemporary Portuguese literature, cinema and photography. About three years ago, after finishing my PhD, I decided I wanted to study something different for a while, to take what in England we call ‘a busman’s holiday’.

I had colleagues working on literature from the various African countries where Portuguese is spoken, as well as contacts researching authors from Macau and East Timor. There seemed to me to be an obvious gap in the middle, the sort of gap researchers like, a gap that led me to the question: is there, or was there, any literature from Goa written in Portuguese that was worth looking at?

Pursuing this line of questioning led me to Vimala Devi and Manuel de Seabra’s A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, a two-volume work on Goan writing in Portuguese published in the 1970s. As well as unearthing innumerous leads, it was here that I discovered Devi’s own work, particularly the short-story cycle Monção.

What I found tantalising about A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa is that so many of the authors and works discussed seemed only to exist within its pages, insofar as I had never heard mention of them anywhere else.

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Chapter 1 is here. Read more about this vital, strangely overlooked book here.

Conversations with the Dead

At my disposal are a limited number of Goan texts, picked up at random along my way. They started me on my present meditations. They led me to the world of the dead and induced me to involve them in my questionings.

To be exact, what launched me was the memory of another text that I no longer have and was not written by a Goan. It was written by an old French missionary, who was to my knowledge the first to attempt an historical sketch of Goa. The book began a trend that continues. It did more, it initiated a cult: the cult of the old ruined city.

Most importantly, it is a text associated with my boy-hood. With visits to Old Goa during the novena of Saint Francis. With early morning crossings of the river in fishermen’s rowboats. Nights spent in the halls of Bom Jesus or the old archbishop’s palace on coverlets spread on the floor. Rambles with my father and a canon of the cathedral from the river’s bank to the hill of the Rosary, to Sao Paulo o Novo, or up the slope to the Monte de Boa Vista.

I remember my father’s excitement. He had the book with him. He wanted to make sure of the exact emplacement of things: the royal hospital, where meals were served on genuine china; the Rua Direita, perhaps not quite straight but axial artery branching out into many neighborhoods; the precise location of the first college of the Holy Faith. Like someone returning from afar to places long enshrined in his memory. As when visiting one of our properties we looked for the ruins of great-grandmother’s house, of which at first the plinth and portions of some walls, then fewer and fewer traces remained…

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Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, earlier this year.

Some of the book is set in a hospital in Margao. Galgut described writing in Goa to the Paris Review:

I first went to India because of my interest in yoga, hoping to go to the Iyengar Centre in Pune for a while. That didn’t work out, but I ended up on a beach in Goa, writing. And for various reasons that was a good spot for me to work in, and I kept going back, often for six-month stretches. I wrote a lot of The Good Doctor and The Impostor there. I think the fact that it was far from South Africa helped to give me some perspective on the themes. In addition to which the warmth and good food and cheap prices, combined with total anonymity, were conducive to a creative state of mind. It became my “other place” for a while. Though I think that’s changed, alas, partly because of the events described in the third part of the book.

Full Paris Review interview + another interview with Galgut by Jai Arjun Singh.