UTM Boss, Ray de Souza, Heading To Abu Dhabi
http://www.mississauganews.com/printArticle/17340
2008-08-05 13:17:24.000

University of Toronto Mississauga's chief administrative officer has been named vice-chancellor at Abu Dhabi University in the United Arab Emirates. Ray de Souza, who has overseen UTM's enrolment growth and recent expansion, which includes some $50 million in various projects, is leaving in September for the new job. He spent the past four years at the Mississauga Rd. campus, and has been at U of T for 20 years. At Abu Dhabi University, de Souza will oversee that campus' anticipated growth, from 4,000 students to 15,000, by 2013.

"It's a big agenda, but look what we've done here," he said, noting UTM's student population doubled, from 6,000 to 12,000, in recent years. "I'm very excited about this (new) job; it's a great opportunity for me." He said the Abu Dhabi campus, in Khalifa City, sits on 600 acres of land, and he'll be overseeing construction of many new buildings there, including his family's home. According to Abu Dhabi University's website, it "has had to grow fast to cope with strong demand from students in the UAE and the Gulf region…" and plans to launch new colleges offering design, law and medical and health science degrees. jslack@mississauga.net

Goans Representing Canada At 2008 Summer Olympics
Source: http://www.goatoronto.com

From left to right: Wayne Fernandes, John DeSouza, Louis Mendonca & Ken Pereira

Goan Overseas Association NSW – Australia, Celebrates WORLD GOA DAY in Style

Click on Image

Dear All

http://worldgoaday2008.blogspot.com/ is the WGD report by Noel G de Souza in the latest issue of the Indian Link newspaper dated 1st August. You can see a full report on WGD 08 plus lots of photos by visiting us at www.goansw.com

Kind regards
Tony Colaco - President
GOA NSW Inc.

EXILE, AND THE GOAN WRITER: A TANGO MADE FOR EACH OTHER?

From: goanet-news-bounces@lists.goanet.org
On behalf of :Goanet Reader (goanetreader@gmail.com)
Sent: August 12, 2008 3:13:36 PM
By: Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
vrangelrib@yahoo.com

It is relevant to the theme of this essay that the very first novel by a Goan to see the light of day was written and published when the author was overseas and far from home. Francisco Luis Gomes pulled off this feat in Lisbon in 1866, while representing our forefathers in the Portuguese
parliament. Since world literature was already two millennia old by then, that was a very late start for Goan literature; it could therefore be described as one tiny step for mankind, but a truly giant step for our people.

Francisco Luis Gomes was only thirty-eight years old when Os Brahamanes was published; its success would surely have led him to write other novels, had he not died aboard ship on his way back to Goa, just two years later. The historical importance of Os Brahamanes was underscored recently by Everton V. Machado, a Brazilian academic and student of comparative literature. "It is not only the first Indian novel to question British colonialism," he wrote.

"It is perhaps the one novel that, for the first time in the history of modern literature, deals with the dynamics of a colonial enterprise, the first fictional work that attacks the Hindu caste system, the first and the most important novel of the literature of the Indian and the Portuguese themselves, the literature written in Portuguese in India."

In stressing the fact that Os Brahamanes was "the first Indian novel to question British colonialism", Everton Machado ignores the fact that Gomes was also obliquely attacking Portuguese colonialism in Goa, but had to choose his words very carefully. In the Lisbon of 1866 he could safely write that "impartial men, those who are inspired by justice and not by racial prejudice, want India to be ruled by Indians," when his real message was that impartial men inspired by justice would also want Goa to be ruled by Goans. In the Lisbon of that period, he could not possibly write that.

Francisco Luis Gomes' success found no immediate successors; ninety years elapsed before another comparable novel emerged: Lambert Mascarenhas' Sorrowing Lies my Land.

This time, however, there was no fudging: India had gained its independence, and it was Portuguese colonialism that was being challenged. Since Lambert lived in Bombay in 1956 and the novel was published there, and Goa was still under Portuguese rule at that time, we can consider his novel too to have been part of Goan diasporan literature. Surprisingly, another challenge to Portuguese colonialism came from within Portugal itself, and that was Orlando da Costa's O Signo de Ira.

It must have taken a great deal of courage for Orlando to have written such a pro-Goa book under the noses of Salazar and his PIDE, especially since he had been arrested three times between 1950 and 1953; and jailed on the last occasion from October 1952 to March 1953.

For his literary achievement, Portugal's Academy of Sciences awarded him the Ricardo Malheiros Prize; for his temerity he brought down on himself the wrath of Salazar, and the book was banned. Ironically, it quickly sold out; and in a further affront to the PIDE it was republished in 1962 and again ten years later. This yearning for freedom in the land of our birth is a thread shared by others in Goan expatriate literature.

The winds of freedom that first swirled in Os Brahamanes and that blew again through Lambert's Sorrowing Lies My Land and Orlando's O Signo de Ira are to be found also in the novels that came after. In my own novel Tivolem, which is set in 1933, they blow strongly in British India but are barely beginning to stir in Goa; they approach monsoon force in Lino Leitao's The Gift of the Holy Cross and Ben Antao's Blood and Nemesis, both of which deal with a later period in Goa's history.

Yet, the universal human yearning for freedom was only one motivating factor leading us to write. The very fact that we found ourselves in voluntary exile in a foreign land may have been another. It certainly motivated Orlando da Costa. Speaking to Fr. Eufemiano Miranda in December 1988, he had this to say about O Signo de Ira: "My first novel was written, above all, for what might be called civic reasons, because it really was the call of Goa and its people that had the strongest and most decisive effect on me."

"Did the distance, the being away or absence for over ten years, coupled with knowing that things are carrying on over there, make me feel guilty? I don't know, but it did stir a sort of nationalism, a need to be involved, to stand up for 'us', a need not to feel uprooted. I truly wanted to write a novel about Goa that would contain all the dignity I could give it."

Peter Nazareth, author of two novels that include Goan characters in an African setting, puts it this way: "The paradox for writers is that in order to contribute to their country, they need to go outside. Maybe this is because at a certain stage of maturity -- one must write about home by drawing from memory and imagination, and in doing so, find meaning in and present it through the words, so it helps to be far from home physically."

Similarly, the late, great Konkani litterateur Manohar Rai Sardessai, pointed out, in Goa: Aparanta, that Goan Konkani literature before Liberation was, to a great extent, a literature of exile. He names several notable writers who "in their writing, display a certain nostalgia for their homeland." Nostalgia for Goa and things Goan ran strongly in the veins and mind of my cousin George Coelho, when in November of 1995 he invited a number of us writers to meet in a Washington, D.C. suburb to discuss our craft.

George as a young man had been a promising poet but had abandoned the pen for psychology. The attendees included Jose Pereira, Dr. Tony Gomes, the eminent electro-cardiologist and poet, Eusebio Rodrigues, and me. Rochelle Almeida, a writer and academician of Mangalorean heritage, was also among the invitees and presented a paper on 'Breaking the Fetters: contemporary poetry by Catholic Goans.' She reported on the meeting in these terms: "What struck me about the convention was the fact that the more years we live away from India and the more fiercely and determinedly we attempt to assimilate into the Goan mainstream, the stronger becomes our bond with the country of our birth and the more acute our longing to be reunited with
it someday." The more we are away from Goa, the stronger the pull becomes.

Is this really true? Does our sense of Goanness, our sense of having a Goan identity, increase as the term of our exile goes from months to years to decades? Obviously, this is an intensely personal question that needs a personal answer, and to find the answer we must examine ourselves. Mulk Raj Anand, that towering figure in Indian literature, gave me some sage advice when my wife and I went to meet him in Bombay in 1988. To find our true selves as writers, he said, we must ask ourselves three questions: "Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?"

Certainly, in order to answer the first two questions, we expatriate Goans would have to examine our roots. But after the second question I would interpolate another: "What and who have I become?" This is important, since, having transplanted ourselves and grown roots in a new land and a new culture, we have all of us changed, some radically, others more subtly. We adapt to our circumstances; we are a very adaptable breed.

In adapting to life in foreign lands, Goans have become cultural brokers, according to Peter Nazareth. Pointing out that he and his brother John were born in Uganda, he says "we were African and not African; Indian and not Indian; and Goan and not yet Goan, because our mother was born in Malaya. But I, Peter, am a classic Goan as being a cultural broker, as I have written about three individuals from three different cultures -- all in one book" And what Peter says about himself is absolutely true. At Iowa University, in the heart of Midwestern America, he has long been a force as an advisor to the International Writers Program and in African studies; his four works of literary criticism have won him international attention.

Example: his writings have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Uzbek. So, though he holds a British passport, having lived in the US for thirty-five years he is at once a de facto American and an internationalist; still, we Goans claim him as a Goan, but Ugandans also proudly classify him as a Ugandan writer.

We all know other Goans who would qualify as 'cultural brokers'; Jose Pereira springs instantly to mind. I must mention here that although in 1971 Orlando da Costa returned to the subject of Goa's liberation with an impassioned play, Sem Flores Nem Coroas (Without Either Flowers or Laurel Wreaths), another four decades were to elapse before more novels by expatriate Goans burst upon the scene. And burst they did, at the unprecedented rate of one almost every year.

George Coelho sensed that the time was ripe, and came up with an optimistic forecast. "We're at that stage now where there's a lot of intellectual critical mass," he told the perceptive Goan journalist, Frederick Noronha, who was interviewing him after one of our get-togethers. "My own efforts are to try to capture that in the area of New York and Washington. There is beginning to be a sort of renaissance --if I may say -- of intellectuals, writers, educators who are very concerned about their own history, their own perspective on that history." The first of the new crop of novels was Tivolem, published in 1998 in the United States and India; in 1999, Lino Leitao's The Gift of the Holy Cross followed in 1999, and Orlando da Costa's O Ứltimo Olhar de Manứ Miranda in 2001.

Meanwhile, Ben Antao had retired from his teaching job with the announced intention of devoting his time to writing; of the three novels he published in quick succession, two -- Blood and Nemesis (2005) and The Tailor's Daughter (2007) -- are based in Goa. And now we have the latest entry: Eusebio Rodrigues' Love and Samsara, also published in late 2007. It was a labor of love that took him decades, because it is set in a remote century and its author wanted to make absolutely sure he got every detail right.

Eusebio began writing what became Love and Samsara in 1981. At our 1995 conference he spoke to us about the progress he had made -- hundreds of pages written down already, and no end in sight. The project was enormous because he "wanted to present a complex panorama of the world and its condition in the early sixteenth century."

His canvas became vast and extensive, he told us. Having already studied Hinduism and Jainism, he had to spend years studying the Muslim religion and its history in India, and also Judaism. "I wrestled with the problem of discovering a language for myself," he told us. "I wanted to discover and invent (in the Latin sense of the word) an English that was uniquely my own, one that would enable me to write about the world of my dreams, a world that I had to create."

Eusebio's novel aside, one striking characteristic of all these works is that each author seems to have felt an obligation to portray life in Goa as we know it, life in the villages and in the towns, life within families rich or poor, even including drugs and violence where these play a part and are relevant to the story; they have thus given readers a sense of a place that is unique not only in terms of its culture, but also its ethos.

In his chapter in Goa: Aparanta on 'Goan Writers in Portuguese', Fr. Eufemiano Miranda says of Os Brahamanes that "it dwelt on the collision between two kinds of Brahmanism -- the brown and the white -- and two types of pride and arrogance -- the eastern and the western: all four are rooted in race and culture."

The same types of collision occur in Orlando's work, and in Ben Antao's, and also markedly in Lino's, and to a lesser extent in mine, because Tivolem dealt with a gentler theme -- love -- and a gentler time and place.

Thus, caste plays a major role in Lino's Gift of the Holy Cross, and a significant role in Orlando's O Ứltimo Olhar de Manứ Miranda and in Ben's T Tailor's Daughter, but in Tivolem it comes up only in the concluding pages as a village mischief-maker's last desperate ploy.

Let us look now at some birth-dates: Lambert Mascarenhas was born in 1914; I myself, 1925; Orlando da Costa, 1929; Lino Leitao, 1930; Ben Antao, 1935; Peter Nazareth, 1940. We are truly an aging battalion, are we not, when the youngest of us is 68? Orlando and Lino have already paid their dues to Aeschulapius and entered a blessed Nirvana that has neither pens nor typewriters nor computers but a celestial harmony includingmandos and dulpods sung by choirs of angels led by a Goan mestre; the rest of us will no doubt follow when our number is called. So where are the young Goan diasporan writers who will take our place? I can think of only one: Suneeta Peres da Costa, who was just 23 when her first novel, Homework, was published by Bloomsbury in the United States in 2007.

Her novel, however, deals with unusual events bedeviling a Goan family in Australia; she has yet to write a novel set in Goa. In an interview in the Weekend Australian, Suneeta states that a novel requires "radical solitude and a kind of rigorous sorrow." Complaining about "a certain anti-intellectual current in Australia," she added: "I want to have a writing, questing life and it seems to me I'll have to be overseas to do that."Perhaps that "overseas" could be Goa!

In 2002 the prolific writer and columnist Cecil Pinto conducted an Internet search for Goan writers in English and came up with seven names, five of whom live overseas and arementioned here. The other two, Heta Pandit and Margaret Mascarenhas, have settled in Goa. His conclusion: "There seems to be an absolute dearth of English Fiction Writers in Goa, whereas the vernacular abounds with works of fiction short stories, novels, plays, etc. Perhaps the current generation of Goan writers will throw up some fresh talent to fill up the lacuna in fiction writing."

Amen to that.

It is in the certain knowledge that fresh talent exists and can be nurtured that I offer free writing workshops in Goa almost every year that I am there. Margaret Mascarenhas, busy though she is, does her bit as well, and so does Ben Antao via email. But all we can do is mentor. What the "current generation" has to do is set the highest possible goals for themselves, and then sit and write. And write. And write.

Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, 82, is a musician and writer who lives in New Jersey, USA. He and his wife Lea, also a musician and teacher, spend more than one-third of the year in Porvorim, Goa, during the winter months. As a member of the Goa Writers group [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/goawriters], Victor gives workshops on writing and acts as a mentor to many young and not-so-young writers.

This article was published in 'Ekvott!', the souvenir of the International Goan Convention, Toronto, 2008, under the title 'The Self-Exiled Goan Novelists: Does Absence Make Our Hearts Beat Faster?' The souvenir was published by The Goanetters Association of Toronto (GNAT) and was edited and compiled by Ben Antao <ben.antao@rogers.com>.

Treasure from Goa
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/erpr/ho_2004.244a-c.htm
http://www.khm.at/homeE107.html

Goa stone container with stone and sand, late 17th–early 18th century India (Goa or western India)
Container and stand; worked gold; Goa stone: organic and inorganic material, gilded; H. container 6 3/8 in. (16.2 cm); H. stone 2 7/8 in. (7.3 cm)
Rogers Fund, 2004 (2004.244a–c)

Goa stones, named for the place where they were manufactured by Jesuits in the late seventeenth century, were manmade versions of bezoars (gallstones from ruminants). Both types were used for their medicinal and talismanic powers. These treasured objects were encased in elaborate containers of gold and silver and often exported to Europe. Surviving examples are recorded in European treasuries, including one made for the duke of Alba in the late sixteenth century (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The stone was usually a compound of organic and inorganic materials, including bezoar, shell, amber, musk, resin, and crushed precious gems, which would be scraped and ingested with tea or water.

The egg-shaped gold container enclosing this stone consists of hemispherical halves, each covered with a layer of pierced, chased, and chiseled gold foliate openwork. An arabesque surface pattern is overlaid with an ogival trellis containing a variety of beasts, some highly Europeanized, including unicorns and griffins. The source of these images is likely to have come to Goa through the Portuguese and may also reflect a particular European patron. (This example was brought to England in the eighteenth century by a British officer in the East India Company.)

S K Shetty : Mangalorean Billionaire Inspiring Young Entrepreneurs
Excerpt from www.daijiworld.com

Shashi Kiran Shetty’s Mantras of Success:

• Risk is an important factor in business, and without risk, hardly will you have gained.

• Be sincere in what you do. You surely achieve a success

• Be transparent always, be accountable to whatever you do. Transparency brings the confidence and it will help you to grow.

• Long-term vision is a must. Don't look for short-cut success..though sometimes you may get success, but it may not last long. Keep a broader vision and march towards what you dream.

Worlds fastest search engine Cuil launched www.cuil.com
Jul 28th, 2008 | By Sindh Today | Category: Latest News, Technology
http://www.sindhtoday.net/category/technology

New York, July 28 (IANS) Pitched as the worlds latest, largest and swiftest search engine, Cuil was launched Monday with 120 billion pages or thrice the volume of the Google index. Click here

Described as a super-stealth search project, it has been founded and developed by the highly respected husband-wife duo of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. Originally Cuill, pronounced as cool, Irish for knowledge, has now been named Cuil. A report on the web quoting the founders claimed that it is bigger, faster and better than Googles flagship search engine in pretty much every way.

The Internet has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 15 years, speedily outpacing search engines. But Cuil is expected to search more web pages than Google - its nearest competitor - and 10 times as many as the search engine of Microsoft. Where Cuil scores over rivals is the way it indexes the web and handle queries by users. Both are costly operations, but Cuil claims to have found a way to slash those costs.

A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for water dogs, crossbreed, cocker spaniel and so on. Some of these related terms do not include the term dog. Similarly by clicking on New York, one would get tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees and so on. A search for Harry would throw up different tabs for Harry Potter and Prince Harry of Wales. Further, the Harry Potter tab will provide more sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates and others associated with the series. That would permit Cuils founders to operate the search engine much more cheaply, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. Google incurs an expenditure of a billion dollars every year on running the infrastructure of its search business.

Cuil also works to understand how words are related. Say France - cheese - wine, to get more relevant results. This is a semantic search approach very different from Powersets natural language approach. Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to grasp what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to categorise and file a web page, even if the category name doesnt appear on the site.

However, Rafe Needleman, writing on the Cuil homepage, cautioned that its one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. Compared with Googles globe-spanning network of data centres, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuils two puny data centres hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Googles crawlers. As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet … No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesnt have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

Recipe For Crab Cakes
Recipe By Diana Rattray, About.com

Serve these flavorful crab cakes with remoulade or tartar sauce.

INGREDIENTS:

• 8 ounces lump crab meat

• 1/4 cup finely chopped celery

• 1/4 cup finely chopped onion

• 1/2 small clove garlic, finely minced, or dash garlic powder

• 1 tablespoon finely chopped red bell pepper

• 1 egg

• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise

• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

• 1 cup soft bread crumbs

• 1 1/2 teaspoons Creole seasoning

• 4 tablespoons butter

PREPARATION:
Rinse and pick over crab meat, discarding any pieces of shell or cartilage. Try to leave lumps as large as possible. Heat 2 tablespoons butter in a large skillet over low heat; slowly saute finely diced onion, celery, red pepper, and garlic until tender. Whisk egg in bowl; add mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, and Creole seasoning. Combine with sauteed vegetables and soft bread crumbs, mixing well. Add the crab meat and form into loose patties; place on waxed paper-lined plate. Refrigerate for about 1 hour, or until firm. Heat remaining 4 tablespoons butter in large skillet over medium-low heat. Gently place crab cakes in skillet and cook for about 5 minutes. Turn and cook for 4 to 5 minutes longer, until cooked through. Serve with a remoulade sauce or tartar sauce. Serves 4.