Goa

On October 12, 2012, the Ministry of Home Affairs delegated powers to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office in Goa to accept and process Overseas Citizen of India card applications. A day later, in a follow-up letter, the same ministry qualified the delegation by noting that the Goa FRRO lacked adequate infrastructure and manpower, and that OCI applications would continue to be dealt with by FRRO Mumbai “till further orders.” That contradiction has defined the situation ever since. ...

This is a translation of an article “Passagem para a Índia” published in the magazine section of O Expresso on December 8, 2001. Translated by Gabriel Figueiredo, reproduced here with his permission. It tells the story of the 1961 Indian annexation of Goa from a Portuguese perspective, through the eyes of Carlos Azaredo. At 0:00 hours on December 18, 1961, the invasion of Goa, Damão and Diu began. It lasted 36 hours. The disproportion was obscene: Indian forces were 13 times larger than the Portuguese garrison. The “total sacrifice” Salazar demanded would have been a tragedy. General Vassalo e Silva, the last governor of 451 years of Portuguese India, understood this when he surrendered. ...

A few months back I picked up a Prestige portable hard drive from IT dot COM, a shop in Margao, Goa. It worked fine for a while, then one day the indicator light started blinking and wouldn’t stop. The drive wouldn’t show up on any of the computers I plugged it into. I was in Hyderabad at the time. I looked up authorised Iomega service centres nearby and found none. None in Hyderabad, none in Secunderabad. So I waited till I was back in Goa and took the drive to the store. ...

GNUSL3S Linux is a distribution built in Goa. It bundles a wide range of pre-installed software spanning bioinformatics (EMBOSS, Primer3), security tools for penetration testing, system administration utilities, and development editors. Boot from the DVD for a graphical interface with KDE, XFce, Fluxbox, or IceWM. Based on: Slackware, SLAX, Alixe, Davix Version: 10.05.xx Architecture: i486 (32-bit) Origin: Goa, India Status: Discontinued

I commute from Margao to Bambolim every day. Normally a 30-minute drive. Today it took me an hour and forty minutes. There’s road construction near Verna that started four days ago. Four days of digging with no visible progress. And they’ve decided the best time to work is during peak hours – 9:30 am to late evening. Exactly when everyone is trying to get to or from work. I was late for an important meeting today. Had to apologise to my boss and to clients. All because someone thought it was a good idea to block a major route during rush hour. ...