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-Brian
Mendonça
‘Religion:
In India there are many religion and the three which I know brifley are
Catholic, hindus and Muslim. People say that there are different gods but I
believe that there is only one and just one god.
Politics:
Earlier politics and today’s politics there has been a lot of change. Earlier
politics was clean, smooth and fare all were treated equally whatever goods
were there were distributed equally and everyone was loved equally but today if
we go to be our politican and politics it has been rough and dirty politican
only feel their pockets they don’t give a sheet to see the people, their needs
only think of their self and their family. Even if others people die they don’t
care. It’s full of corruption. The roads today are full of ‘holes’ but the
poiticans don’t repair them because of them today many young youth have died.
Other main thing and that is politicans have entered our religion . . . They
made the Catholic people suffer a lot our nouns what harm they made why they
are suffered a lot?? They made our Catholic hope less but as I have seen
through this our Catholic faith has been increasing day by day there have a
rally which was recently done by our Catholic brothers and sisters and in which
many people took part lot number of priests and nouns were also there . . . Its
important and one must not get politics into religion. Religion is separate and
politics.’
Commentary:
The above is an excerpt from an English essay by a teenager in Goa.
While it is plain to see
that the student has ideas, command over the English language to provide a
vehicle for these ideas is sorely lacking. Is the teacher going to go
back to the drawing board and begin to teach spellings, homonyms, punctuation
and palindromes?
Is the world view of the Goan
teenager inscribed only by three religions? This is a pathetic perception of
India. Still, festivals like Navroz – the Parsi New year is scarcely
commemorated in school. Why is there such a disjunct between theory and
practice?
In another question on
diary entries for a festival of India spread over 4 days, most students gushed
over generalities like ‘many cultural performances,’ ‘great music,’ ‘lovely
dances,’ and ‘boring’ poetry readings. What was absent was any confidence to
name any thing unique to a particular state, viz. Bihu from Assam; Khakra
from Gujarat, Bhangra from Punjab or Kamala
Das from Kerala. Students seem to shy away from this cultural immersion.
The problem is systemic. Teenagers hardly read the papers. IT and smart phones have given most of them a false sense of eloquence. Take-home assignments are ridden with material copied from the internet, and passed off shamelessly as one’s own.
With few exceptions, when it comes to Goan
teens, there seems to be a general apathy towards India, academics and English
language skills – a crucial matrix --with scant hope in sight.
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Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 26 April 2015; pix courtesy zazzle.com
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