Goa Diary: Rambo, frogs-legs and how Tharoor took on Mahatma

By Mayabhushan Nagvenkar Parrikar as Rambo II Panaji: Gujarat doesn’t have India’s only political Rambo in Narendra Modi. Goa has one too in Manohar Parrikar, its chief minister and a self-confessed Modiphile. For a chief minister who repeatedly accuses the media of being irresponsible and sensational, Parrikar proved last week that he could be possessed with those two qualities too, once in a while. The IIT alumnus-turned-politician in true ‘Armageddon’ style announced last week that a container ship sailing from Singapore to the Middle East had cracked mid-sea, around 500 km off Goa’s coast and its wreckage was drifting towards the state’s coastline. That much is fine. What’s not was Parrikar’s shocking revelation quoting “unconfirmed reports”, that the ship’s cargo contained “bombs, guns” intended for rebels fighting Bashad al-Assad’s forces in Syria. And that the containers carrying the ordnance were drifting towards Goa’s coast at five knots an hour.[caption id=“attachment_925563” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. AP[/caption] Was it alright to trigger such a statewide alarm through the media, especially when the information was based on “unconfirmed reports”? But one sympathises with Parrikar, especially when the man himself claims, has no faith in the country’s intelligence apparatus because of their alleged penchant for peddling bogus reports. “There is no need to rely on reports from intelligence agencies. The agencies send false reports anyway. Very often they have even spoken to me before filing their reports. One can easily lie and those lies find their way into their reports,” was Parrikar’s precious nugget for the month. One only wishes one of the ‘I’s in IIT stood for intelligence. Hey Ram! When Tharoor took on Gandhi… Father of India Mahatma Gandhi’s vision for India finally met its nemesis in the Godfather of the Indian Twitteratti, Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor last month. The elegant and erudite Tharoor used a Goa beach resort to poke holes in Gandhi’s vision of ‘Gram Raj’ in a free India, where every village would be self sufficient. That, Tharoor claims, is simply not possible in the world we live in, almost defying the basic fundamentals of the man the Congress and the country pays obeisance to. “There’s something not realistic about the notion of gram raj. The world is moving in a different direction,” Tharoor said, during a question and answer session following his key note address at the World Management Conference organised by a collective of Indian Institute Managements at a resort in Miramar, located on the outskirts of Panaji. “It seems more improbable in the era of inter-dependence and globalisation. There is no realistic process of attainment…We are a much inter-dependant globe,” Tharoor said, adding that the idea of villages growing its own food and being self sufficient may not be feasible in our lifetimes. Too bad, this precious beauty slipped under the radar of the social media turks, who have been waiting for a “cattle-class” kinda redux. ‘D’ for donation It’s a bad time to be a bouncer in Goa. But if you are into extortion, the sky appears to be the limit in Goa. Bouncers, those bicep rippling, tough-looking men, dressed in menacing black (as if in readiness for your wake), will now have to register themselves with the state government, after five of their tribe assaulted and roughed up a city doctor. The five bouncers were on guard at the shoot of Abbas Tyrewala’s film ‘Mango’, when they physically launched into Dr Oscar Rebello, who was crossing the road on his way to the clinic. The outrage forced Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar to call for ‘reform’ in Goa’s booming, but unorganised bouncer industry, which feeds off the state’s pubs, discos, even illegal iron ore mines which need guarding. The outrage, however, inadvertently opened up another can of worms: extortion by the capital’s civil society. Goan line producers, guys who arrange logistics for film shoots in Goa, accused a civil society organisation of demanding protection money to the tune of Rs 50,000 for conducting film shoots on public roads in the elite Campal area, which is home to beautiful Portuguese-style architectured residences. Only the ‘demanding’ residents prefer to call it “donation”, spent for the upkeep of private bungalows in the area. If only the dreaded Dawood Ibrahim knew such wordplay! Meat matters It’s a good time to be a frog lover, but a bad time if you happen to love contraband frog meat. Increased presence of agro-chemicals in the fat deposits of Goan bullforgs now means you could have a date with cancer if you ever bite into a juicy morsel of frog-leg cutlet, sold in a hush-hush manner in a few coastal eateries. They call it ‘Jumping Chicken’. Increasing toxification of sea and river waters has already started taking a toll on Goa’s fish. With heavy mining silt deposits and sewage pollution already affecting shellfish, prawns and other fish which frequent sea shallows and river beds, the options in a conventional Goan non vegetarian platter appears to be shrinking pretty fast. The state is also facing a massive beef crunch, with the state government failing to find a way to put the red meat on the dinner table, after the high court tried to streamline the functioning of Goa’s only abattoir. That leaves just pork and chicken, the only two other commonly eaten meats in Goa, which are as yet unsullied by any controversy or shortage. Modi and the Hindu Nation Even as the bigwigs of the Bharatiya Janata Partied (pun intended) their way through a three-day convention in Goa last month, another saffron conclave running simultaneously a short distance from the capital appeared to have missed the media’s eye. In the temple complex of Ramnathi, 30 km from Panaji, Hindu leaders from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc, had gathered to attend the All India Hindu Adhiveshan. Its unsurprising agenda: to make India a Hindu nation. The adhiveshan, which stood no chance of media coverage, what with Advani’s ‘ill’ antics and Modi’s elevation, did manage to secure a little bit of media attention, thanks to the Gujarat chief minister. Modi’s written message was read out at the Adhiveshan where the BJP’s face for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls called upon all Hindus to keep the flag of ‘Dharma and Unity’ intact. The adhiveshan got a shocker though when a BJP MLA, Vishnu Wagh, decided to take on Modi through an article, incidentally published in the Goa Doot, a Marathi newspaper perceived to be the voice of the BJP in Goa. Wagh, an outspoken legislator from the St. Andre constituency, asked how Modi could send a congratulatory message to a conclave which openly demands that India be made a Hindu nation? “Our constitution says India is a secular country and Modi has sworn to uphold the same constitution, when he was elected chief minister of Gujarat,” Wagh said in his column ‘Bahujan Mat’. “What was Modi thinking when he sent it to them?” Wagh further asks. Don’t we all know what the chief minister was thinking around that point of time by now? To become the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for 2014… DUH!