By Ben Antao

When retired civil engineer Guirish Sardesai, of Burlington, Ontario told me that the 7 th biennial convention of the Goan Organization in America (GOA) would be a reunion of family members, close friends and old classmates, I decided to check it out, being curious, as I had known about this organization since 1994 when the second get-together was held in Chicago. They usually meet during the weekend of the Fourth of July, and this year was the first time the group decided to meet in Toronto—actually at the Holiday Inn in Burlington, about 50 km west (or 45-minitue drive from Toronto).

I was pleased to be a delegate and delighted to meet and mingle with so many of my Goan Hindu brothers and sisters who like me had left Goa and settled in North America. The lilt and pitch of their Konkani voices worked like a charm and carried me back to my student days in Margao of the forties and fifties. Indeed, two of them told me they had also passed their SSC from New Era High School, but later than in 1953, the year I graduated.

The interaction was so spontaneous, open and friendly that I gained a fresh admiration for the unique Goan personality. There was not the slightest whiff of caste or religious consciousness, but only an attitude of friendship stemming from sheer pleasure and a sense of celebration.

“There is no hidden agenda; they’re here to have fun,” said Guirish, the key organizer of the conference. He and his wife Asha and their three daughters helped to make the convention a success.

“We Hindus always understood that Catholics are one of us, and so it was no problem living in peace and harmony,” said Dr. Prabhaker Sardesai, a heart specialist who has lived and worked in Erie, PA for the past 30 years. His wife Pratibha is the daughter of the late Vaikuntrao Dempo, the unsuccessful Congress candidate in Pernem constituency in the first 1963 Goa elections.

She looked surprised when I told her I had gone to Pernem to check out how her father was doing when I was a reporter for The Navhind Times.

“You didn’t want to retain your maiden surname after marriage?” She smiled and shook her head.

“Just as well,” I said, “Sardesai is a nobler name.” She laughed.

Actually it was another delegate, a Dr. Suresh Dubhashi of Panjim, who drew my attention to Pratibha when I mentioned the newspaper I was working for in Panjim. We were seated around the same table at dinner on Saturday. Suresh had come directly from Goa for the convention, one of 210 participants representing 75 families, most of whom from the United States. He was earlier introduced to me by his doctor friend Dilip Sanvordeker, a pharmacologist living in Irvine, CA.

While at the registration table, I was greeted by Arun and Subhada (Rekha) Sawardekar, both doctors, who had organized the first convention in 1993 in Pittsburgh, PA. “It’s Rekha who did it all. I had nothing to do with it,” said Arun.

That first get-together of friends had grown to become a biennial event worthy of celebration and eagerly looked forward to.

Goans love food, drink, music and dance and at the convention there was plenty of it. During the cocktail hour, the hors d’ouvres (spicy chicken pieces and cute, small samosas) were scrumptious. Dishes at the lavish buffet dinner were also appetizingly spicy, a la Goan cuisine.

After a leisurely two-hour breakfast on Sunday, delegates heard Dr. P. S. Ramani, the renowned neurosurgeon, who is a senior consultant at the Lilavati Hospital and Research Centre in Mumbai. He flew into Toronto to address the convention on the topic of backache, after giving lectures on this subject at the University of Minnesota, Wayne State University, and University of Toledo, Ohio. His audio-visual presentation was much appreciated.

Earlier I had shown photos of Goa 2004 that I had taken during my month-long visit in January-February. A couple of slides featured fishermen pulling in their nets at the Miramar beach. Referring to the fishermen, Dr. Ramani said their backs had to be very strong since they needed 200 times the power of bodyweight to drag in the nets.

Delegates then enjoyed a three-and-half hour cruise of the Toronto harbor. The scenic cruise, with lunch and music, aboard a chartered Northern Spirit of the Mariposa Cruise Line was sponsored in part by Dr. Prabhaker and Mrs. Pratibha Sardesai. Here on the deck the young and not-so-young hammed it up to the nostalgic melodies of Konkani folk songs, dekhnis and dulpods. And the food had the obligatory Goan spice to it. The weather was fair and nobody seemed to miss the Euro Cup soccer final being played in Portugal. Talk about living it up!

Following the cruise at 3:30 pm, the youths aged 12 to 26 dispersed to experience the awesome view of Toronto from the CNN Tower, 1465 ft up. Then they returned to Burlington for an all-you-can-eat international buffet while the adults enjoyed another cocktail hour and buffet dinner.

Then there was Ranjan Sardesai, 63, who chuckled affably when I said his address was most interesting--Portuguese Bend Drive in Missouri City, Texas. He told me he was one of the 11 young adults in their 20’s (he mentioned the names of Aravind Bhatikar and Uday Bhembre) who had protested at the Marathi Sammelan held in Margao in 1963. “It’s our protest that ignited the Konkani movement and led the path for the language to be included in the 8 th Schedule of the Constitution,” he said.

After dinner, delegates were treated to two hours of delightful recitals of Indian classical and semi-classical music, natya sangeet, ghazals, and film songs rendered by a group of six professionals (four men and two women) based in Toronto. The evening’s entertainment was sponsored by Sham and Suman Shirsat, of Chicago and Drs. Pradeep and Sadhana Keni, also of Chicago.

On Monday, after breakfast, a general meeting and lunch, delegates adjourned with happy faces, knowing they would meet again in 2006 in Chicago.

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