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Laudate Si

April 19, 2026

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With Fr. Felix at Laudate Si farm, Valpoi

-Brian Mendonca

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Brand Baboi

Signboard outside Baboi's place at Agassaim. Goan sausages basking in the sun. Fredy weighs the sausages. Fredy holding on to his lifeline. - Brian Mendonca I did not intend to land up here. After all, I was told there were no Goan sausages to be had. In a conversation I had on the way here at Verna, I was asked 'Have you ordered your sausages?' I replied in the negative lamely. Because of the Exposition at Old Goa (today was the last day) the demand was high, was the explanation offered.* The person then asked from where I was coming. I found that odd. Intrigued by the question I decided to take a chance and see for myself if I could salvage some sausages. The matter was urgent as there were guests expected for dinner tomorrow. I knew there was a shop selling sausages in Agassaim but I did not know exactly where. Today, being Saturday, I decided to find out. Queenie had shared the Google location of Baboi and I followed the d...

Konkani Poetry

Yesterday I gave a PPT on the topic 'Glimpses of Contemporary Goan Poetry in English and Konkani' for students of a college. The request was made by a student of mine who I had taught around 20 years back in the college I am teaching in now. She still remembers, she said as she introduced me, me teaching Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' in class. I tried to remember but the memories escaped me. There were a goodly number of students, around 40, who took time off from their hectic 'Fun Week' which seems to be the rage these days, to hear a poet read his lines. The deafening music outside the lecture hall soon mellowed into the cadence of poetry. For me this was a learning experience since I had never handled Goan poetry in Konkani and English on the same platform. But I realize that using Konkani, can have many benefits to leverage English in L2 classrooms. True enough, the students which were mostly from the Konkani department (The talk was jointly o...

'Sangati' by Bama

'Sangati' by Bama -Brian Mendonca Sangati (1994) by Bama Soosairaj (Born 1958) was originally written in Tamil. The English translation was made available a decade later. The title means 'events' in English. It prepares us for what is to follow. It is a telling of events as they happen - from the point of view of a Dalit Christian woman in Tamil Nadu, India. The novel is divided into 12 chapters divided into subsections. Here is a summary of the chapters with lines quoted from the text. Chapter 1: A Woman's Family (3-14) Pathima, a 13-year-old narrator, studying in Class 8, asserts agency over the narrative, 'When I was born . . . .' (3) The mother Sevathi, and grandmother are introduced. The grandmother, Vellaiyamma Kizhavi, is a...

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