The statements, opinions, or views in the articles may not necessarily reflect that of the Goan Voice Canada.

A Nation Without Moral Values Is Equal To Chaos
Published : April 01 2009
http://www.indiancatholic.in/news/storydetails.php/11696-1-1

Fr Sunny Jacob, SJ

Values are those things that really matter to each of us ... the ideas and beliefs we hold as special. Caring for others, always upholding truth, standing for justice etc. are values; so is the freedom to express our opinions. Most of us learned our values - or morals, from at home, at church, Sunday classes, or at school. But, today where are our children learning their values? Maybe from parents, teachers and religious leaders, but society has changed. Too often young people today are most influenced by what they see and hear on television or on the street. They learn a lot of counter values from the electronic media, Internet and many other external sources.

I think this is an area the Church in India must take very seriously. I am not saying that we need more documents on values. We need more action. There is a de-generation of values in our society. Young people are looking for models. But unfortunately our media give undue importance to people like Varun Gandhi and Narendra Modi! This make them larger than life image! The victims are actually the youth who tend to think that hatred and authoritarian approaches are something to imitate for!

In the school where I am, I have been interacting with young boys and girls on values and I find there is real confusion today among them. They tend to think that good values are difficult to practice and they won’t bring them success! This is really a problem the young ones face today. But at the same time they are very receptive and upright as students. They all have an inner urge to be good, yet they find it difficult to pursue these good values in life because of what they are fed with by the media and other agencies.

For this reason, we have introduced Personality Development classes for the senior students. They also take part in club activities where we provide ample opportunities to them to reflect discuss and discover vales for themselves. We have media education, analysis, and assimilation in and through these clubs. There is a creative approach to all these clubs and students find it extremely helpful in cultivating and nurturing values for life. We help our students to develop positive values while learning to make ethical decisions.

These clubs express a well-defined code of ethical and moral conduct. They are based on these abstract ideas - trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Thus these become very concrete goals for young people.

These values are not our invention. They were there from time immemorial. But we introduced new tools that provide a means for teaching today's young people how to apply these abstract ideas in everyday situations.

We believe that if we in our schools design such programmes to keep young people busy and involved in all sorts of projects that integrate their head and heart, the values they are learning will help them to strive toward well beyond their schooling years.

After years of talk about the "moral decay" in just about every area of our life, our society seems to be turning around looking for values that can guide this nation to greatness. To pass good values on to our children through school programmes relies upon three components: caring adults (Men and women for others), age-appropriate and purposeful activities, and meaningful roles in the Society.

Leadership training and public speaking have been revised to help our students become better, more effective leaders ... to recognize that young people develop physically, mentally, socially - and, yes, ethically - at different rates ... to identify social service projects that drive home the message that young people, by interacting with people in their society, can have a positive impact on the world around them. To this we have ample opportunities of students exposure programme to various centers like orphanages, Old age homes, Leprosarium’s, and Children’s homes.

Building a nation is building its young generation and vise versa. They have to be given good values for development, good examples to imitate, and good actions to engage with. If we fail in this aspect in our schools then Christian schools will not be different from the schools that are around us.

I remember some people questioning the relevance of running English Medium schools in the cities for ‘elite’. In the context of Kandhamal violence I read one comment by one learned man saying, ‘in our schools we are nourishing serpents’. I think what he failed to look into is the way we run the schools. What way are we different from the so called ‘money making’ schools? Is that running schools for city schools a problem or the way we run them is the problem? I think many a times we miserably fail in being creative and future oriented. We need to open up more schools with a difference in more areas. In Orissa, I firmly believe, that if we had many influential schools and colleges that impart right values to our students the magnitude of violence would not have been there in Kandhamal and also the response from the civil society would have been more realistic and vociferous. We cannot afford to ignore being creative in imparting good values in a world where hatred and violence, corruption and communal division overlaps the young minds.

We need to have creative ways and means to instill good vales. Perhaps we, with all our net work of schools all over, must think seriously this aspect more than ever now. A nation without moral values is equal to chaos. A democracy without secular values is a myth. A mission without future orientation is dead.

Put Yourself In The Service Of Neighbours: Pope
Published : March 30 2009
http://www.indiancatholic.in/news/storydetails.php/11672-1-12-Put-yourself-in-the-service

VATICAN CITY (Zenit.org): Pope Benedict XVI encouraged the community of a poor immigrant parish in Rome to have faith that even though God can't be seen, he is near to those in need.

"We know that the 'sun,' although hidden, exists, that God is near, that he helps us and accompanies us," the Pontiff said today upon addressing the small parish of The Holy Face of Jesus at Magliana, which is located on the outskirts of the city. "So, in this sense we want to journey toward Easter knowing that there are suffering and difficulties in our life but with the awareness that behind it there is the sun of divine Goodness," he added.

Benedict XVI exhorted his listeners, many of whom gathered in the rain outside the small church, to put themselves in the service of their neighbor, especially those who have problems because of the economic crisis. He pointed to St. Maximilian Kolbe -- who sacrificed his life in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz to save the life of fellow prisoner who had a family -- as an example of charity to follow.

"In our time, marked by a general social and economic crisis, the effort that you are making above all through the parish Caritas and the Sant'Egidio group, to help the poorest and neediest as far as possible, is meritorious," he said.

Many communities and congregations are active in the parish, which serves some 15,000, many of them poor. Caritas, the Militia of the Immaculata (founded by St. Maximilian Kolbe), the Padre Pio Prayer Group, the Community of the Risen Jesus, the Neocatechumenal Way and the Community of Sant'Egidio are all active in the parish.

The Congregation of the Poor Daughters of the Visitation run a local nursing home, and brought many of the elderly from the home to see the Pope. The church was named after St. Maximilian Kolbe in 1982, but changed its name to The Holy Face of Jesus in 2001.

Whose Blood is This?
Mourning the Death of Gregory Fernandes
By R. Benedito Ferrao
12child@gmail.com

From:goanet-news-bounces@lists.goanet.org on behalf of Goanet Reader
Sent: April 1, 2009 3:47:35 PM
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Excerpt
Gregory Fernandes was murdered because he was Goan. His killers received sentence in March 2009, but the Goan sailor's slaying still leaves a lot to consider.

Reporting on the incident, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) states in headlines: "Sailor Attacked 'Because of Race'" (October 23, 2007; online) and "Seven Held Over 'Racist' Killing" (October 26, 2007; online).

Perhaps the impression the BBC wishes to give by placing the reason for the attack in quotes is that a sense of neutrality is required; that one's opinion should not be clouded by such incendiary terms as 'race' and 'racist' until the true course of justice has been followed.

Our community has long had its share of travelers, migrants, and a storied diasporic existence, with Goans employed in so many different capacities the world over. We readily remember such prominent figures as Abbe Faria who, literally, entranced nineteenth century France with his work in hypnosis; Pio Gama Pinto who in 1965 became independent Kenya's first martyr; and Vimla Devi whose writing in Portuguese spans several decades.

But in remembering these great and illustrious Goans, what room is left for such unsung heroes as the rig-workers, cabin boys, sailors, nannies, and cooks? Often separated from their kin in Goa, they have offered their families opportunity and financial security.

Like so many Goans before him and, certainly, many to follow, Gregory Fernandes traveled outside his native Goa to make a living. On October 20, 2007, the 32 year old Goan sailor and his Tamilian colleague Pithilnaviram Vinod were set upon by 20 English teenagers at Fawley port, Southampton, just outside their hotel, in a racist attack. They were both severely injured and, shortly thereafter, Fernandes died. Gregory Fernandes was murdered because he was Goan. His killers received sentence in March 2009, but the Goan sailor's slaying still leaves a lot to consider.

Reporting on the incident, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) states in headlines: "Sailor Attacked 'Because of Race'" (October 23, 2007; online) and "Seven Held Over 'Racist' Killing" (October 26, 2007; online).

Perhaps the impression the BBC wishes to give by placing the reason for the attack in quotes is that a sense of neutrality is required; that one's opinion should not be clouded by such incendiary terms as 'race' and 'racist' until the true course of justice has been followed.

Perhaps the English sometimes have a way with words, using their own language to successfully allay the real issues at hand --- 'Race' and 'racist,' physically sectioned off in these headlines imply that attacks of this nature are random and solitary, detached from regular English society and aberrant to it. But, truly, can it ever be the case that twenty English youth wake up one day and decide to attack a couple of unwitting people of color and kill one of them, or are their actions indicative of a more prevalent but covert racism?

The Daily Mail reports that the gang of drunk teenagers was heard to have said they wanted to "beat up a Pak" (February 29, 2009; online). This premeditation instantiates a current of xenophobic hatred that made these youth believe they could perpetrate the kind of crime they had planned because they thought so little of the lives of their intended victims. Moreover, they thought they could get away with it because they considered their beliefs to be widely held.

One incident alone might not sufficiently support this view. Sadly, Gregory Fernandes is not the only one whose life was taken in a race-related incident in England in recent times.

Following the 7/7 bombings and the failed July 21, 2005 bombing in London, police shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station on July 22, mistaking him for suspect Hussain Osman, a Briton of Ethiopian descent. The victim was a 27 year old Brazilian national who had a few years prior come to the United Kingdom to work. He was unarmed and shot at point blank range seven times.

The bereaved de Menezes family, much like the Fernandes family, found themselves having to pressure the authorities to follow up on the case. Neither the mainstream English media nor the inquest into de Menezes' death clearly stated that race was a factor in the Brazilian man's killing.

To do so would be to acknowledge that race is a tangible factor in how the English police system addresses and deals with issues of terrorism. The use of racial profiling is an obviously deeply flawed and arbitrary method of apprehending a suspect as evidenced in that a light-skinned Brazilian Latino could be mistaken for a Black African British suspect. At the close of the legal inquiry, the de Menezes family stated their discontent with the proceedings, raising several queries about police procedures.

On the contrary, Merseyside police were particularly careful in their investigation into the death of eighteen year old Anthony Walker, who like Gregory Fernandes was assailed by a group of youth. The young man was with his girlfriend and a cousin when attacked; he died from a blow to the head with an ice axe.

Walker was Black and his girlfriend White. The group of White youth responsible for the crime was earlier heard being racially abusive to Walker. Incidentally, they had all grown up in the same neighborhood as their victim. This fact is in sharp contrast with the statement delivered by the Justice who presided over the case who stated that Walker's death was the result of a "racist attack of a type poisonous to any civilised society" (December 1, 2005; guardian.co.uk).

The Justice's declaration while deservedly strong still marks the racist victimization of Walker as being extraneous to a society where civility is equated with Englishness and Whiteness. It thereby refuses to recognize that they might emerge from the process of racialization and the anxiety of maintaining the centrality of Whiteness to the British state.

The violent desire for a racialized hierarchy of difference reveals itself in the brutal stop put to the inter-racial romance between Walker and his girlfriend.

The attention given this case by Merseyside police was principally driven by the events of twelve years prior: the April 22, 1993 murder of Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence in southeast London. Lawrence died following a racialized encounter, just as Fernandes, de Menezes, and Walker had.

Like Walker, he had been waiting at a bus-stop when he was surrounded by White youth, racially abused, and stabbed to death.

Doreen Lawrence said that in the aftermath of her son's murder, the Metropolitan Police demeaned her family as would "white masters during slavery" (February 25, 1999; independent.co.uk). None of the youth responsible for her son's killing were prosecuted. The perseverance of the family and the initiation of the landmark 1999 Mac Pherson review of the Metropolitan Police which deemed the organization to be institutionally racist, changed the face of British criminal justice.

Lawrence's murder revealed the comparable racism in society and state systems, such as law enforcement, and became the measure by which all future race-related murder crimes were to be gauged.

As reported by the BBC, following delays in the investigation of Fernandes' murder, Flavio Gracias of the United Kingdom's Goan Association was prompted to draw parallels to the Lawrence investigation, when he said, "We hope that history will not repeat itself" (January 18, 2008; online).

The cases recounted here reveal that history has repeated itself. These are the more famous of the
examples that disclose the underlying race tensions that continue in multiracial Western societies
today.

The anxiety and grief of a family based in Goa, represented by the victim's priest uncle Father Diogo Fernandes who lives in the United States, while seeking answers in the United Kingdom indicates the complexities underlying Gregory Fernandes' case.

The transnational nature of the Fernandes family's tribulations is matched in the struggle for justice
instigated by a British mother whose daughter was murdered in Goa. White teenager Scarlett Keeling's body was found on Anjuna beach on February 19, 2008. The efforts of Fiona MacKeown, the deceased's mother who had left her fifteen year old in Goa while visiting another part of India, led to a second post-mortem which revealed that homicide was involved.

Keeling had also been raped. Consequently, the media circus that ensued in India and the United Kingdom, and the efforts of Goa's police to cover up their mishandling of the case, led to various deliberately disingenuous stories about the personal lives of the dead young woman and her mother, focusing on their lifestyles, class background, and sexuality. These stories maligned the two women and undermined the grief of a parent over the loss of her child in highly suspicions circumstances.

It must be stated that the rape and murder of Scarlett Keeling in Goa and by Goans is completely indefensible, as is the obstruction of justice following it. Of issue, instead, is the idea that no one dies in "paradise" the impression that Goa as a holiday destination allows for a different set of rules and values than one would have apply to themselves in their countries of origin.

The racialized nature of Keeling's murder may also seem to imply that an instance of reverse racism had occurred. Yet, such an allegation is not only specious, but also attempts to reduce critiques of extant racism in the West by misleadingly claiming the universality of racialized discrimination as common practice the world over.

It is ironic that while the British media readily spoke of a Goa where Westerners like Keeling were vicitimized (as in the March 9, 2008 The Independent: 'British Families Still Happy to Live Hippie Dream as Goa's Lustre Dims'), it refused to consider its own nation racist in light of the aforementioned crimes that had occurred in England.

Surely, it would be more worthwhile for concerns over the safety of women, frank and open discussions surrounding sexuality, and the exposure of the corrupt workings of state agencies to be equally applicable to the wellbeing of foreigners and locals. Goa is after all not just a holiday destination. It is also the home of Goans who continue to live here long after the foreigners are gone.

The murder of Scarlett Keeling in Goa and that of Gregory Fernandes in England connect questions of justice and the rights of victims in an increasingly globalized world.

Furthermore, linking the murders of Fernandes, de Menezes, Walker, and Lawrence, in England, highlights the conditions wherein people of color, be they Goan, Brazilian, or Black; visitors, guest workers, immigrant, or Briton, are connected.

In an editorial headline, the Goan newspaper O Heraldo inquires, "Gregory Fernandes Murder: Anyone Cares?" and reminds the Goan government of how this young man's income "[contributed] to the welfare of the state" and exhorts the state government to advocate for the rights of overseas
workers; it similarly inquires what "Goan organizations both locally and internationally [are] doing about this" (November 6, 2007; online). The subtle point this editorial makes that should not be lost is that Indian workers abroad come in different income brackets and from different class backgrounds, poignantly reflecting classiest bias in government practice.

In her article "Growing up Goan-British," writer Selma Carvalho begins by surveying Goan immigrant identity in Britain in the recent past and arrives at the conclusion that "Goan immigrants today seem to be more firmly rooted in their sense of being Goan than ever before." Nonetheless, she does not discount that "racism is still very present in British society [even if] the days of 'nigger-hunting' have passed away." (March 8, 2009; O Heraldo).

While Carvalho suggests a current British racial formation that departs from the blatant racism of the 1970s and 80s, she too readily subsumes the specter of institutionalized racism in her reading of Goan-British identity as hybridity or even assimilatory practice, predicated upon middle classness. Additionally, her foregrounding of Goan middle class identity as Britishness, though not dismissive of discrimination, excuses it in lieu of less visibly violent forms of racism in prescribing class ascendancy as a preventative.

For instance, upon interviewing a charity Fundraising/Marketing Assistant and a History teacher, both of whom "contend that they have not felt discriminated against [at] work," Carvalho decides, "It is largely upto the individual to make an effort and go the extra mile."

Being Goan and successful, however, is no deterrent to race crime in England, no matter one's class background, as borne out by Gregory Fernandes' murder. Finally, both the O Heraldo editorial and Carvalho's analysis fail to adequately connect racism against Goans with racist violence against other groups of color. While Gregory Fernandes died because he was Goan, he also died because he was a person of color.

Efforts against racism that concern themselves solely with issues of national or ethnic origin define themselves too narrowly and any exhortation of Goan institutional advocacy, in Goa or the diaspora, would be more fully served with a recognition of diversity in terms of class and the commonalities of racism.

On March 20, 2009, Gregory Fernandes' killers received their sentences having pled guilty to manslaughter rather than murder. But judicial sentences alone do not alter society.

The legacy of race related violent crime in England is a stark reminder of educational, social, legislative, and legal changes yet to come. Each time a murder of this nature occurs, it must be considered contextually and historically in relation to the society in which it occurs rather than as a singular event in the contemporary moment.

May Gregory Fernandes' soul rest in peace.

-- R. Benedito Ferrao is affiliated with the University of London and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently visiting Goa.