FN: Frederick Noronha’s blog

Here’s an April 2003 review of Fordham University professor emeritus of theology Dr Pereira’s book, co-authored with the late maestro Micael Martins of Orlim and priest - psychotherapist - musician Antonio da Costa now based in Arizona. Details below. Published in 2003 by Aryan Books <aryanbooks@vsnl.com>, this volume deals with Mandos of union and lamentation.

http://www.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet/2003-April/001564.html

Some publication data:

%T Song of Goa
%S Mandos of Union and Lamentation
%A Pereira, Jose <eximirom at hotmail.com>
%A Martins, Micael
%A da Costa, Antonio
%I Aryan Books International
%C New Delhi
%D 2003
%O paperback
%G ISBN 81-7305-248-4
%P 190pp, Rs 200
%U aryanbooks@vsnl.com
%K Goa, music

Here’s Goacom’s page on books
http://www.goacom.com/culture/books/

[While officials debate the issue, what is the situation on the ground?
Any comments from Vascokars? -FN]

SMD’s strictures on PIs of Vasco, Mormugao, Canacona

[GOMANTAK TIMES, Dec 27, 2005 Page A4]

By A Staff Reporter
reporters@gomantaktimes.com

MARGAO: The countdown to the New Year is generally known for its fun and
festivity and dances galore being organised throughout the state. But
the Deputy Collector and Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM), South, Suresh
Pilankar, who is the authority for implementation of sound pollution
regulations, has condemned the “action on th epart of the police
inspectors (PIs) for their indirect way of refusal of his instructions
and the modalities they have employed in doing so” and flayed the PIs of
the Vasco, Mormugao and Canacona police station for their ignorance of
the law.

SDM Pilankar in his three-page report dated December 26, has referred to
the copy of the order of the Bombay High Court in writ petition 366/1999
pertaining to noise pollution and has passed strictures on the police
department, urging them to initiate immediate action against the
violators of the sound pollution regulations.

In his report, Pilarnkar has regretted that “the in-charge of the police
stations are unaware of the magisterial arrangements made by the
government under the provisions of the CrPC in the state to handle the
law and order situations.

He stated that “it is not understood under what provision of law, the
in-charge of a police station can ask the SDM to deputy an executive
magistrate at the police station during night hours”.

The SDM claims that “as per the directions of the Supreme Court, no
magistrate can be permitted to visit a police station, especially at
nights and that the Supreme Court has also directed that the magistrate
should not be asked by the police to be a member of the raiding party.”

He stated, “inspite of the above directions of the Supreme Court, the
PIs asking the SDM to deputy an exective magistrate during night hours
at the police station is not only the height of ignorance of the police
in-charges in the Margao sub-division but also it is contempt of the
directions of the Supreme Court.”

By such reply, the PI of the police stations in the South Goa district
have shown their incapability of honouring the directions contained in
the order of the High Court, instructions of which in fact has also been
issued to the Director General of Police (DGP), Panjim by the Under
Secretary (Home-II).”

“The wireless messages of the Vasco, Mormugao and Canacona PIs are more
concerned as the in-charges of these police stations are ignorant as to
whom they should approach for the orders for maintaining of law and
order in their jurisdiction. He feared that such indirect refusal of
directions would even put the chief secretary to problem due to such
contempt.

The SDM has appealed to the South Goa Collector to draw this to the
attention of the SP (South) and to convene a meeting of the senior
police officials along with all the magistrates in the district, so that
the concerned officers can be educated on the provision of law so far as
maintaining law and order and complance of the direction issued by the
court.

The SDM has also sought the intervention of the Home Secretary, if the
district magistrate deems it essential.

Earlier, the SDM had on December 24, instructed the in-charges of the
police stations in the Margao sub-division to be alert to the violations
of the sound pollution regulations and received wireless messages from
them requesting him to depute an executive magistrate at their
respective police stations for the implementation of the court
directives.

[Should policemen be celebrating religious festivals in their stations
in a secular state, which ought to have no link with religion? Or do you
see this as a good means of building inter-community understanding and
tolerance? Your views? FN]

Christmas spirit hits Vasco policemen

HERALD, Dec 27, 2005

HERALD CORRESPONDENT

MORMUGAO, Dec 26 — They may be men and women in uniform and most of
them may be Hindus, but that did not stop the Vasco police from
celebrating the spirit of Christmas by making a crib in the police
station.

The cops attiributed this unusual project to their Police Inspector
Sammy Tavares. The staff involved in the crib said that PI Tavares gave
his full co-operation and support to the project and also praised him
for his support and co-operation during the Ganesh Chaturthi.

“Even though we had no experience in making cribs, all of us got
together and completed this crib,” says Constable Santosh Bhatkar.
“Earlier, there was no one to guide us and few had an interest in
celebrating other festivals.”

Photo: The crib at the Vasco police station. Photo by Elvino Araujo

[An interesting issue for Vascokars. Would you buy the usual official
argument that short-staff is to blame? In a state which has the highest
bureaucracy-per-capita, we keep hearing this version. Any opinions? FN]

ELECTRICITY DEPT HAS FEW MEN TO POWER UP VASCO

Herald, Monday, Dec 26, 2006

HERALD CORRESPONDENT

MORMUGAO, Dec 25 — Given the high density of industrial and domestic
buildings in the port town, one would have imagined that the Electricity
Department would be present in full strength.

On the contrary, the acute shortage of staff at the Electricity
Department has posed a number of problems in the maintenance of power
supply at Vasco.

Residents have complained that officials are rarely at the department to
attend to electricity-related complaints.

The general grouse is that officials either don’t lift the phone or
simply state that linesmen are attending to a complaint.

At times, angry locals have literally forced the linesmen to come out of
the office and restore a faulty line.

Speaking to Herald, Executive Engineer Lakshmanan S explained that the
deparmtnt is faced with acute shortage of manpower.

“Many have retired and their posts are yet to be filled up,” said
Lakshmanan.

According to the Executive Engineer, the Mormugao Sub-Div IV presently
has 21 linesmen and three JEs, though the actual requirement is 35
linesmen. The Vasco Sub-Div, he added, has 53 linesmen as opposed to the
actual requirement is 75 linesmen.

“Due to shortage of linesmen, when any power is disrupted simultaneously
at two places, the linesmen cannot attend to both calls at the same
time. Peopledon’t always understand the difficulty the department faces
due to lack of staff,” said Lakshmanan. “Sometimes, the department
cannot even dispatch the required number of linesmen to solve the
problem.”

Commenting on the erratic behaviour of linesmen at the complaint’s
section, he pointed out that linesmen are already burdened with other
complaints and tend to snap at people who insist on immediate
restoration of a faulty line. Lakshmanan, however, promised to look into
the matter.

The Executive Engineer informed that one once the new line starts from
the Kadamba bus stand, the problem in the city would be solved and
added, the workload on the city linesman would be reduced.

He also mentioned that the department will install a new transformer at
the Kadamba bus stand power station, which will also benefit parts of
Mangor area. (ENDS)

Vasco houses razed for highway. 28 houses demolished. (Herald)

o Defence ministry has 1678 acres of land in Dabolim airport, since
April 1962, Rajya Sabha MP Shantaram Naik was told in a
parliamentary reply. Naik sought to know whether the
Government had title documents of the Dabolim airport, its
date of acquisition of title, area, etc.

There’s this mailing list called VascokarsUnited which has a lot of potential… but is moving slowly. Wonder if this blog could be of any help to help with their goal…

[Any views on this issue? Is this a concern in other parts of Vasco too?
FN]

Mangor garage cause of mishaps

HERALD, DEC 26, 2005

HERALD CORRESPONDENT

Vasco, Dec 25 — Rash and negligent driving is normally the cause of
mishaps in the port town.

But at Mangor-Vasco, the mishaps have been attributed to another cause
– a roadside garage at Mangor-Vasco.

Residents of Mangor have complained that a number of mishaps have taken
place at a spot in front of a garage near the Ambabai temple. They
stated that two vehicles find it difficult to negotiate as the footpath
is allegedly occupied by the garage.

The residents allege that one Salim Mohammed, who runs the garage,
utilises both sides of the road to repair vehicles or to dump damaged
chassis of vehicles.

They claim that fights have regularly taken place between the garage
owner and parents, who fear that their children could fall victims to
mishaps in the area.

When asked to pint out their area of activity, Salim Mohammed’s son
insisted that there was no such thing as an area of repair. He went to
state that they could repair the vehicles anywhere on the road.

To a query on the garage licence, he could not show the licence and
stated that it had been left at home.

Cliff Missen <MissenC@widernet.org> wrote from Tunis, during the recent
WSIS, asking queried whether I was there. I wasn’t. But he took time off
to share with me some interesting information via email, about the
eGranary.

What’s that?

As Cliff explains: “An eGranary Digital Library at each could save
millions in Internet connectivity costs, giving patrons the capacity to
determine how they spend their communication funds (accessing local
documents for free and then deciding which resources they are willing
to spend Internet connectivity to retrieve.)”

He also wrote: “There’s a lot of ways to spread eGranaries, but my
personal favorite involves us training technicians who will train
technicians who will build eGranaries and train librarians and students
all over.”

Other options can be found at:
http://www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/costOfOwningeGranary.htm

He says he “understands” that there are some efforts underway to build
information centers around India.

Cliff Missen is Director of the The WiderNet Project at the University
of Iowa. Phone 319-335-2200 or www.widernet.org

He says their eGranary Digital Library is now installed in “over 60
institutions in the developing world”. He’s keen to connect with those
interested in using this technology “to deliver a wealth of information
to scholars with little or no Internet connectivity”.

For some background: The eGranary Digital Library provides over 2.5
million digital resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet
access. Through a process of copying Web sites and delivering them to
intranet Web servers inside partner institutions in ‘developing’
countries, this digital library delivers educational materials for
instant access over local area networks.

Says the project proponents: “For schools that are spending enormous
amounts of money for their slow and unreliable internet connections,
the eGranary Digital Library slips seamlessly into the network and
delivers its Web pages up to 5,000 times faster. At the same time,
such schools can save tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs
every year. For those schools, clinics, and libraries WITHOUT an
Internet connection, the eGranary Digital Library is a phenomenon!”

It is working in more than 60 institutions in Africa, Bangladesh and
Haiti, and the eGranary Digital Library says it provides lightning fast
access to a wide variety of educational materials including video,
audio, books, journals, and Web sites, even where no Internet access
exists.

Incidentally, this library represents the collective contributions of
hundreds of authors, publishers, programmers, librarians, instructors
and students around the globe. Some of the many authors and publishers
who have granted permission to distribute their works via the eGranary
Digital Library include: U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Columbia
University, Cornell University, MIT’s OpenCourseware, UNESCO,
Wikipedia, the Virtual Hospital, World Bank and WHO.

It was founded in 2001. And the eGranary Digital Library was created by the
WiderNet Project, a non-profit organization based at the University of
Iowa. This project is now looking for more authors and publishers to help
grow its collection to 10 million documents, volunteers to help
collect and categorize new materials, and librarians and teachers to
help get the library installed in thousands of schools, hospital and
universities.

In brief, websites with rich educational content are identified, the
author’s or publishers’ permission is obtained by email. Between 50-90%
agree, depending on their content area. Permitted material are copied
to a hard-drive. Sometimes, an entire website is copied. Copies are
distributed using large hard disks. WiderNet Project has also worked on
ways to deliver incremental updates using other transport mechanisms
(IP, satellite digital radio, CD-Rom, etc).

Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu@randomink.org> of Kolkata recently
announced that he had updated a PDF version of this lecture with an
unusual title — Tongue to Fingers: Colonizing IT in a Postcolonial
World.

It was a lecture given to the Refresher Course for teachers of Applied
Psychology in Calcutta University by Dipankar Das dipankard@gmail.com.

You can download it from http://www.ilug-cal.org/dd_lecture.pdf

A quote: “Not that there is no way out. GNU/Linux is there. That gives
a totally fully-armed laboratory to go on experimenting and working,
and thus knowing what a computer actually is. But so few takers remain
there. Because, as we said, the enemy resides within. It is a culture
of dwarfs that is deliberately generated. A culutre that is pursued by
the parents: that is us, dwarfing our own children. The process of
dwarfing starts with the replacement of language on the Command Prompt
by a picture and a mouse-click. It goes on. Take away the shell, the
Operating System. And then take away all the programming languages.
Just job-doing remains. It serves the postcolonial project.Closequote.