fredericknoronha

It’s no big name, but this is a bold experiment. It’s open, and it’s in Panjim (the tiny capital of Goa, India). Anyone can join in. All you need is an instrument, and the ability to read music. Rui Lobo, an IIT-ian whose main trade would have been hardware design, is the conductor, and it’s [...]

Goodbye to a teacher, friend and guide
Ivan Rocha, a popular teacher from North Goa’s Mapusa town’s St Britto’s died at 61, and here are some scenes from his funeral at the village of Parra.
Posted in Goa

Indian head massage… for a five-year-old
Says wikiHow: “Massages can be given to aid the process of injury healing, relieve psychological stress, manage pain and improve circulation. The effectiveness of Indian head massage, also known as Champissage (champi is an Indian word for head), is based on alternative medicine principles, specifically those surrounding energy flow, or chakras. It’s an ancient technique that Ayurvedic healers have been using for thousands of years, and it’s becoming more and more popular in the Western world.” http://www.wikihow.com/Do-an-Indian-H…
Posted in Goa

A Goan slumdog millionaire? Nothing so glamourous
An attempt by volunteers (with official support) to help students in government run primary schools (mostly attended by the poor) to pick up English language skills in Goa, a former Portuguese colony.
Posted in Goa

Video + school = videoshala
When video starts being educational in parts of Gujarat (western India), it gets called videoshala. Shala is the world for school. Deepika explains the concept behind VideoShala.
Posted in Goa

Patrice Riemens from the Netherlands has his own understanding of issues of technology and society… Here he talks about the role the Dutch have played in cyberspace (and why), and his research in India on multinationals coming out of here even a quarter of a century ago!
Posted in BytesForAllIndia, Cyberspace, Goa Tagged: dutch cyberspace indian multinationals xs4all patrice riemens india research on india hippies from hell goa amsterdam

Sandra Sudhoff… on mapping
Sandra Sudhoff is from CartONG. This organisation delivers “assistance for information management and mapping in the field”. Its main partner is the UNHCR. Says she, “We have worked on the Google Outreach project and created a Google layer in collaboration with UNHCR to present some of their humanitarian projects in a pilot phase. Next phase is scheduled to kick off in 2009.
Posted in Goa

A small bookshop from Baga
Last week, I ran into Jay-Jay’s, a second-hand bookshop run by Nairobi-born Bosco and his wife. “We started it a few years back, with a little bit of reject stock from the Mandovi (hotel bookshop). It was something the foreigners looked forward to. We grew from then,” says Bosco. “The bookshop has been our pride,” says Bosco, who also runs a restaurant too. What makes it special, he believes, is the type of books: books which
are popular among Europeans. “We have quite a few books that you don’t get in Goa,” he says of his 2000-title strong collection. “We don’t want to overstock because people get confused, so we mostly select (popular books from) the top bracket.” Their books include non-fiction (guide, biographies and autobiographies, true-stories), French, German, Swedish books. Says he: “We are dealing with tourists.” Their model is interesting. They buy second-hand books, from the tourist, and sell them also to the tourists. When you buy the book, you’re free to return it back, and you get half the price.Virtually a library, without the danger of losing books.
Posted in Goa

From the 42nd Mando Festival, Panjim, Goa Dec 2008
Some mando works…
Posted in Goa

An interview with Germany-returned musician who has inspired local talent to go further.
Posted in Goa

Francis Rodrigues, lawyer based in Toronto, talks about a book project he launched recently. It’s an introduction to Goan music, in an unusual way. It focuses on music of the past fifty years, and attempts to take it across to those wanting to understand and play this music… music is transcribed (for solo instruments, flute, bands, guitars), lyrics got written down (and set to English verse) and even translated. “Most of the people were (most) interested in the translations,” says he. “What we’ve also done, as a header to each song, there’s a story to each song… the composer’s intentions are there, and the history behind this song.”
Posted in Goa

Retired bank officer Isidore Dantas of Pune/Mumbai reluctantly agreed to be captured on tape, after showing his work on a book related to Konkani films. Dantas, who traces his roots to Saligao, had his family
based in the Curchorem area, where his grandfather was a regidor (village official). He has also volunteered translations in the past, for an attempt to build up a Konkani wikipedia…. Email: Keywords: konkani, roman script, film, writing, sayings, konkani sayings, dictionary, konkani dictionary
Posted in Goa

Dr Timothy Walker has been studying the role medicinal plants played in the colonial economy. Check this out…
Sitting in dusty archives rooms in Goa, Dr Timothy Walker has unearthed an amazing story of what the Portuguese learnt from Indian and South Asian traditions of plant-based medicines in the early colonial phase (around the 16th century). After a recent (Thursday, Jan 15, 2009) talk at the Fundacao Oriente, he spoke to FN and explained what his research was all about.
Keywords: medicinal plants, goa, india, portugal, 16th century, old goa, colonialism
On Thursday, Jan 15, 2009 at 6 pm, Timothy’s talk was titled, Supplying medicinal plants for the royal hospital: an
Indo-Portuguese medicinal garden in Goa 1680-1830.
As he put it:
Three hundred years ago, the practice of medicine in Goa’s colonial health institutions relied heavily on medicinal plants from India and even Africa, South America and China. It had become thoroughly hybridized. To ensure a ready supply of common local and imported healing herbs, the Royal Military Hospital in Goa maintained on its premises a medicinal garden, supervised directly by the Chief Pyshician of the Portuguese Asian Empire.
Professor Walker’s talk focussed on this garden as a multicultural space, wherein European and non-European concepts about healing blended. He described the physical space of the garden, its Indo-Portuguese caretakers and their unique medicinal cosmology. He described various medicinal plants cultivated in Indo-Portuguese hospital gardens, their applications and effects, as well as the social context in which the medicinal practitioners who employed these plants operated.
Timothy Walker is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachussets, Dartmouth, USA, and a visiting professor at the University Alberta in Lisbon, Portuguese. His teaching and research fields include Early Modern Europe, the Atlantic World, the Portuguese and their empire, maritime history and European global

Discussing… and music-book to be (and other gossip)
Francis Rodrigues, Goanetter based in Canada, was down recently. Some unofficial shots from a discussion at the much-hyped (but modest) Cafe Prakash in Panjim. Get a whiff of the coffee (and the kind of discussions that go on there everyday). And you thought the creative (and critical) process was dead in Goa?
Posted in Goa

Of Konkani, writing, cartooning… and reviewing
Quepem-based Walter Menezes has been working to promote the tiny Konkani language for a long time now. Some of his experiences.
Posted in Goa

A scenic part of Goa is going under the builder’s axe. Jason Keith Fernandes, a National Law School-educated lawyer and campaigner, explains what are the issues there.


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Tags: goa, villages, speculation, real estate, taleigao, dona paula
Posted in AltIndia, Opinion

At the August 2008 GNU/LUG (GNU/Linux Users’ Group) meet in Miramar, Goa, participants share knowledge and ideas about Stellarium, the astronomical free software product. An example of how teaching and learning, and the sharing of useful knowledge, happens at a Free/Libre and Open Source Software network. Check it out.

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Tags: software, GNU/Linux, ilug-goa, miramar, goa, india, software skills, learning models
Posted in Educational, FLOSS in Asia, FL

Dr Pramod Kale is perhaps the first scholar to focus on the traditional Konkani theatre form (the tiatr) in such detail. Here, the scholar, now retired, talks to FN about his views of the same….


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Tags: tiatr, goa, theatre, india, konkani, researchers, academia
Posted in Goa, Konkani, Media, Music

Tania Pérez Bustos is a PhD student from Colombia doing fieldwork in India. Her research is on the educational and gender dimension of experiences like FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) that aim to popularize technology. She says, “I really liked the statement in the (BytesForAll) website in which you assume a critical position towards ICT and the political context it is immersed in … unfortunately not very common.” Here, she talks about her work, and her encounter with India, Colombia, and

Mentoring.