Goan Voice, Canada : Newsletter. Issue 2003-2. Jan.25, 2003

Census shows Toronto still has world's highest rate of newcomers
ELAINE CAREY Toronto Star DEMOGRAPHICS REPORTER

Ethnic neighbourhoods — once the hallmark of Toronto's inner city — are expanding into the surrounding suburbs. And the immigration influx is changing the very face of the booming 905 regions.

While Toronto used to be the first landing spot for newcomers, Markham has caught up, becoming the first municipality in Greater Toronto where more than half the population is comprised of immigrants. Fully 53 per cent of its residents are foreign-born and 56 per cent are visible minorities, according to new data from the 2001 census released yesterday.

But new immigrants are making their first home in areas all over the GTA. While they comprise just under half of Toronto's population, they also make up more than 40 per cent of the residents of Mississauga, Brampton, Vaughan and Richmond Hill.

Of Greater Toronto's 4.6 million people, 1.7 million — or 36.8 per cent — are visible minorities, up from 31.6 per cent five years ago and a quarter in 1991.

'Hate speech' Condemned
From The Catholic Register
LAHORE, Pakistan (CNS)

Students Honoured For Essays To Coincide With Week Of Prayer for Christian Unity
From: The Catholic Register Jan 26, 2003
By: CATHOLIC REGISTER STAFF~TORONTO

Dr. Colin D'Cunha appointed to the post of Commissioner of Public Health and Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM)

Cities attract greatest numbers Urban centres pull in most immigrants
ALLAN THOMPSON Toronto Star OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA—The census report released yesterday tells a story that immigration officials already know by heart — that immigration to Canada is a tale of three cities.

And for Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre, the census finding that Canada's newcomers are increasingly gravitating to Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal is more ammunition for his bid to create new programs to distribute new immigrants more evenly across the country.

"The challenge will be to encourage immigrants to settle in other regions of Canada to allow all parts of the country to benefit from immigration," Coderre said in a statement released yesterday.

Home ownership rates soar 61.6% in Toronto own their houses First-time buyers are driving market
TONY WONG Toronto Star BUSINESS REPORTER

Spurred by first-time home buyers who are taking advantage of low interest rates, more people in the Toronto area own their own homes than ever before, according to a survey.

By year's end, an estimated 61.6 per cent of all Toronto homes will be owner occupied — or owned by their residents. That's up from 60.9 per cent last year, 59.2 per cent in 2001, and 54 per cent in 2000, according to a Re-Max-Compass Research survey released yesterday.

"BELIEVERS" FORCED TO LEAVE MANDREM: A group of 14 young people, who called themselves Believers and wanted to propagate their cult among the local folk of Mandrem, had to face the wrath of the local people, who asked for unconditional apology and then putting garlands of chappals (footwear) paraded them through the streets from Sawantwada to Korgao. (GT)

CRICKETERS TO ENDORSE GOA ON TV: Buoyed by the encouraging response to its promotional campaigns last year, the state government is now getting cricketers to endorse Goa as the best destination for 365 days holidays on Star Plus during the forthcoming World Cup tournament. (H)

NIC LAUNCHES WEBSITE: Directorate of Marketing & Inspection recently launched agricultural marketing information network (Agmarknet). Computers have been set up in around 800 markets all over India to collect daily information on commodities' arrival and prices under this project. The market yards at Margao, Mapusa, Ponda, Curchorem, Canacona and Sanquelim are covered under the project. (GT)

13 LAKH "DESI" TOURISTS: The year 2002 registered the highest ever inflow of domestic tourists to Goa crossing 13 lakh. In 2001, Goa played host to around 11.2 lakh tourists. The number of foreign travellers to Goa during the same period could not be known as the statistics have not been compiled yet. However, sources said that it will not be less than the previous year's…Goa played host to more than 4750 Russians so far this season. Most of the customers stay in starred hotels giving an indication that they are high spenders. Some have moved to quiet beaches like Morjim. (H)

COLOURFUL SKIES AT VAGATOR , KITE-FLIERS PROMISE A RETURN TO GOA: Two days of colourful skies ended at Vagator beach on Sunday evening, with organisers of the state's first Goa kite carnival promising to "come back" if they get the support from the state, sponsors and citizens.
http://www.goacom.com/news/clippings/kites/kites.html

Thank you for making Goan Voice USA the premier source of news for the US Goan community. Membership has grown 230% in the last year. Goan Voice USA is a periodic, low-key, volunteer-based, non-profit, brief email update of Goan events & Goans from around the world. Thank you to all who contributed to this issue. Please send your accomplishments, achievements, announcements to goanvoiceusa@yahoo.com. To subscribe, unsubscribe or change email addresses write to goanvoiceusa@yahoo.com

From the JOSEPH NAIK VAZ INSTITUTE: Preparations are underway to commemorate the 292nd death anniversary of Blessed Vaz on January 16, 2003 with renewed calls for the Vatican to canonize this deserving Goan saint. In a press release issued on the eve of his death anniversary, the JOSEPH NAIK VAZ INSTITUTE urged the Vatican to include more people of color among saints and among the top positions in the Vatican and not favor only Europeans and Westerners, as has historically been the case. The Institute also urged Goan priests, nuns, and laity to do much more to promote their own people and other people of color. On January 16, 2000, Blessed Joseph Vaz was made the Patron Saint of Goa (formerly St. Catherine was the Patron Saint and not other saints as was widely believed). Visit www.josephnaiknaz.org.

Goa Sudharop Award winner and Advisory Board member, Rene Baretto rbarreto@ntlworld.com, has embarked on a new venture to promote Konkani by starting the World Konkani Forum group. Membership is open to anyone interested in promoting the language. To learn more about the Konkani Forum group, visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/konkaniforum. To start sending messages to members of this group, simply send email to konkaniforum@yahoogroups.com or contact rbarreto@ntlworld.com

Events

4th Meeting of the Goan Engineers/Professionals ~ Toronto
Message from Stephanie Mendes (stephaniemendes@yahoo.com)

The next meeting of Goan Engineers/Professionals is scheduled for Sunday, February 9, 2003 at11:00am at the Pickering Nuclear Information Centre at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. See the map below for more details. If you are driving east on Montgomery Park Road, turn right to go towards the station. The Information Centre is on the left. There are visitor signs posted that should lead you right there.

Again, I encourage you to bring along your spouse/partner, friends, or children who may be interested in a career in an engineering or related field. There will be a small collection to pay for the refreshments/lunch that will be available. Please RSVP myself at stephaniemendes@yahoo.com to confirm if you will be attending and how many people you will be bringing. The agenda will be provided at a later date but will include networking, career planning, professional development, getting a job, health &safety in the workplace.

The Goan Konkani Troupe (GKT) will be holding their next production in the early spring of 2003.

The GKT welcomes new members. Dues are only $4 per annum. New members and supporters are needed for the following:

For further information please contact: Lourdino Rodrigues @ 416 244 7923, e-mail Santano Rodrigues antanolrodrigues@hotmail.com

The Goan Konkani Troupe is interested in hearing from those who wish to understand spoken Konkani, and conduct a basic conversation. If there is sufficient interest a series of classes can be arranged in the west Toronto area. Those interested in learning, or able to assist in teaching, please contact gkt-konkani@goanvoice.ca

GOAN CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION (Toronto)
You can make a difference

Come and support our
"Annual Walk-A-Thon"
on Saturday, June 7, 2003 9:00 a.m.
at Lakeshore Promenade (in Mississauga)
* Free BBQ * Free Refreshments * Free-T-shirts and prizes for participants
Have a great time and help your brothers and sisters in need in our community.

Daydream fuelled Sundance documentary
B.C. film-maker wanted a story about two children living radically different lives.
By Kevin Griffin.
Source: Vancouver Sun. Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Click here for the article...

An idea born daydreaming on the bus between the University of BC and Tsawwassen has resulted in a local filmmaker creating a short film that's been chosen for Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival.

Called Olivia's Puzzle, the 12-minute documentary by Jason DaSilva depicts the different lives of two seven-year-old girls: one who lives in Ladner, and the other in the village of Aldona, Goa, the former Portuguese colony in India.

DaSilva's film will play five times at the Park City, Utah film festival known around the world as one of the premiere venues for independent film-makers. It will be shown several times along with The Murder of Emmett.

Till, a Stanley Nelson documentary about the 1955 murder of an African-American teenager in the Mississippi Delta which helped spark the civil rights movement in the U.S.

DaSilva's film has already won first prize at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival. It premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival and has shown at several other film festivals around the world.

DaSilva, 24, conceded he doesn't really know that much about Redford -- something which surprised his mother. But he said when he travels to Park City, he wouldn't mind meeting the famous actor and director -- and using the festival as an opportunity to market his film.

"It'll be fun -- after all the festivals I've been to, I've learned how to schmooze really well," he said.

The Sundance Institute was founded in 1981 by Redford to showcase independent films. By 1985, it grew to encompass an existing film festival in Utah and officially became the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. This year's festival runs from Thurday to Jan. 26.

DaSilva got the idea for Olivia's Puzzle while on the bus home after a sociology class at UBC. He thought that the best way to show how socialization and the environment shape individuals would be to make a documentary about two children living in radically different situations.

He first wanted to make a film about two boys but couldn't find the right subjects. With help from his family, who are from Goa, he was able to find two girls: one is his cousin Olivia Athaide who lives in Ladner. The other is Reshma Sham Kamulekar from Goa.

DaSilva's grandmother Irene also played a critical role in the making of the Olivia's Puzzle. Since Reshma doesn't speak English and DaSilva doesn't speak Konkani, the native language of Goa, his grandmother acted as the all-important intermediary who translated for everyone.

The film shows the two seven-year-olds at school, talking with their friends, the foods they eat and how they see themselves in the world. The puzzle, DaSilva said, is how Olivia views her own culture and her awareness of it as a child.

DaSilva said one of the major contrasts between the lives of the two children is when they talk about the future.

"Olivia says that when she grows up, she might be an artist or a dance teacher. Reshma says she'll get married, have kids and work in the fields," DaSilva said.

DaSilva said he doesn't see himself sticking exclusively with making documentaries. He'd like to move back and forth between fiction and non-fiction -- citing Mira Nair, who started out making documentaries and has also made the hit feature films Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding.

Interested in comics as a youngster, DaSilva added sound and motion to his narrative skills while at Emily Carr School of Art and Design. For several years he also created Good Tasty Comic for Discorder, the magazine published by CITR, the student radio station at UBC.

In my grandfather's house, where I lived as a child, I remember a clock striking the hours and half hours. At night the mellow yet resonant chimes echoed through the house, but the clock would not strike without first producing a prolonged whirrr, like a rattlesnake warning of danger.

No danger lurked in that house when I was a child, but it was a different story altogether when my grandfather was alive. In those days, Ranes were frequent visitors, Rauji Rane among them, because my grandfather edited and published a weekly newspaper in this very house, and the paper---the "Correo de Goa"--was very much pro-Goan. An almost complete file exists in the Central Library in Panjim; the only missing copies are the ones that I suspect the Government found so offensive that they confiscated them, shutting down the Correo twice.

Some years ago I was allowed to browse through those files. In one editorial, Hipolito Caetano Pinto complains about the calibre of the newest appointee to be Governor-General of Goa; it seems, he says, that Lisbon thinks so little of us that any absolute nonentity can be sent to rule over us, even a lowly lieutenant in the navy. And in desperation he cries out: "In the name of God, leave us alone!"

Family tradition tells us that the Portuguese would not leave him alone. Every now and then the mundkars would come running to our house, to warn him: "Bhatkara, godde etat!" But when the horsemen who had been sent to arrest him cantered up to our gate and strode up our steps, Hipolito Caetano Pinto was nowhere to be found.

Once, after searching the entire house and getting no answers from my grandmother, an officer sat my mother, then a child of five, on his lap, and gently asked, "Tell us, child, where is your father?"

She could not tell him, because she did not know he was still in the house, hiding in a bumhyar. Twice he and his brilliant young brother-in-law, the lawyer Mariano Vaz from Anjuna, had to flee to Bombay to escape the wrath of the Portuguese, most notably when Gomes da Costa implicated them, and their friend the Visconde de Bardez, in the Rane rebellion of 1895.

Hipolito Caetano Pinto's portrait still hangs on the wall of the family living room; it shows us a young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties. a man who wears a troubled look and seems to have much on his mind. His eyes are averted. I stand before him and a thousand questions crowd my own mind.

Alas, my grandfather died in 1897, almost thirty years before I was born, but my grandmother lived on until 1941, and she had much to tell us about him. But I was barely a teenager then, and though I loved her stories, I had no sense of history, no inkling at all of the importance of oral tradition and the links it can provide to our past. My father, too, who was born in 1881, had stories to tell about those days, and his own involvement in the Rane revolt. Though as a teenage cadet he served on the opposite side, his admiration for the Ranes, particularly Rauji, was unbounded.

Death has silenced all those voices, and the files of the Correo de Goa now sit unexamined in the Central Library, gathering dust along with hundreds of other valuable documents of past centuries -- they are now deemed to be too fragile to be looked at by anyone.

So the whirring grandfather clock was right---the passage of time does indeed pose a danger. Not only do we lost bits of oral history as each older generation dies out, but our written documents are in danger of becoming inaccessible as well.

The rest of the world preserves such documents on microfiche. We don't. "There's no money in it," a noted young historian told me recently. "There's money in restoring a decaying historical building, but there's no money in preserving a document."

Bruce De Souza, awarded $58,000 Scholarship to Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, BC

Bruce De Souza, son of Mathew & Theresa De Souza of Montrea, Canada, and grandson of Caetano & Regina De Souza of the famous Souza Sunshine Bar in Entebbe, Uganda, was awarded a $58,000 Scholarship to Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, BC. At his high school graduation ceremony last June, he received many accolades, among which include the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec Award, Class of 2002 Silver Award, Class of 2002 Honour Society, Fermat Canadian Mathematics Competition, McGill University Science Award, as well as various subject distinctions. He was also elected Most Outstanding Male Student Award by his graduating class.
From Nick DeMello