TOO MUCH PETTY KUSKEPONN!

 We had lunch in the shade of a garden at Gomango a little further up. Kingfisher beer for Manuela and Vishnu (who drives) and Chinese lunch...

 AS I WRITE this up on a Monday morning I guess I’m in the dumps and I agree with my dog, cat, parrot, bull-loving friend Manuela Machut that the creatures of the wild, even though many of them have lost their natural habitats and have been domesticated, exploited and tortured on a large scale by our obsolete urban and industry-driven civilization (a civilization which puts its own comfort and convenience first) make for better and more loyal friends than the human being! Manuela who’s got Blackie Bindi (a stray puppy which she adopted from the streets), Rama (a parrot which “talks” to her and accepts food from atop her tongue!), Bully (a discarded, injured bull which she adopted and nursed  back to health)…who’s seen zoos around the world and who is a shareholder of the Berlin zoo, has taken to visiting Goa’s one and only zoo at Bondla. She says she’s appalled by what she has seen and with her Germanic determination is now determined to lobby for better treatment for the zoo animals. Better, more spacious accommodation for the collection of snakes and for the good Lord’s sake, look at those rusted layers of unkept wire barricades and cages in which seven leopards (offspring included) live …she is besides herself with distress and anguish and naturally wants to do something to improve the conditions for the animals in the pathetic apology of a zoo.

I don’t know if she is going to thank me or not for writing about this here but this is just by way of pointing out anew how we human beings in the process of making our lives more comfortable and convenient  (always more and more obscenely comfortable and convenient) make life increasingly difficult for the other wonderful creations of the good Lord. We have encroached on what was their home long, long before evolution took a giant leap forward and yes, we’re behaving like jerks. We have no respect or space for dogs, cats, birds, tigers, elephants… and trees, flowers, herbs…and oceans, rivers, lakes, springs, mountains, hills, forests….we exploit, torture and abuse in the name of our so called civilization! And we pollute and we poison and kill and while killing laugh with the false joy of achievement so that Mother Earth’s cupboard becomes more and more barren of the natural goodies meant to be shared by all creatures big and small…

 We have distorted and perverted the law of survival of the fittest and increasingly in our arrogance cast ourselves in the mould of the Lord God our Creator, and if you’re asking me  we hardly behave like the original Creator in  terms of caring and sharing. We chase our urban, industrial, artificial dreams to satisfy not just our needs, but our wants and our never ending greed…and I have now more or less accepted that our civilization has spawned the present era called kalyug when bad things happen to good people and seemingly good things happen to bad people! We’re so blinded by the “miracles” of our science and technology that we’ve become blind, deaf and dumb in the real and more wholistic sense of the words.

A MORE ECO-FRIENDLY LIFESTYLE, PLEASE

I DO BELIEVE that we should return as quickly as we can to save, salvage, restore, woo Mother Earth (especially in Goa where there is so much worth saving). It means changing  our lifestyles to be more earth-friendly, eco-friendly. Restrain and discipline urbanization and industrialization, concentrate on restoration of our natural, ever-giving resources…take pride in farming small-scale or large-scale, grow our own food organically; and above all reduce the mindless use of non-biodegradable plastics in our day-to-day life. Re-cycle, in fact eliminate the mind-boggling amount of litter with which our race alone has cursed Mother Earth….how many of us have even succeeded in eliminating the use of the plastic bag  — the one ubiquitous hallmark of our great civilization???

A more eco-friendly lifestyle means always taking our own shopping bag along while shopping, using ink-filled fountain pens instead of use-and-throw ball pens, making changes in our ways of drinking and eating (e.g. shunning eatables packed in plastics), avoiding deadly polyesters in our attire, saying goodbye to the siren song of  cigarettes, booze, gutka, drugs ….given our urban, industry-driven infrastructure it’s not going to be easy but begin somewhere, please. If we can think with a vision of the future and act individually and locally in a myriad ways we can make life worth living both for ourselves and the other residents of the good earth. Then there’s hope for us. Otherwise, guilty or innocent, look around you, we are already paying the price for our follies of too much intelligence and gross affluence. A civilization which behaves like it does not know and does not care eventually reduces itself  to a civilization of  pampered weaklings (couch potatoes!) with practically nil or zilch heart and soul. If we carry on fuelling easy lifestyles of want and greed we reduce ourselves to a civilization of third-rate human beings! Never mind the veneer of sophisticated affluence (it’s rotten at the core)….and the more third-rate, fourth-rate, fifth-rate, etc., we become, the more we will subscribe and return to the old medieval cauldron of religious politics. As in me Hindu, you Christian, me Buddhist, you Muslim, me superior, you inferior, me live, you die! See what I mean?

This is to say think about all this and don’t just think. Do something to make room for the rights of the other person no matter how humble and poor (the second India we keep talking about and can’t escape from, including the second Goa), for the other creatures and creations of Mother Earth. Then perhaps Mother Earth (the original Goddess of Plenty) will relent and return to us a lost happiness which if you’re asking me is today torn asunder with far too much needless kuskeponn!

DISCOVER GOMANGO!

IT WAS dear friend Manuela who took me to the Bondla Wildlife Sanctuary to see the zoo in dire straits. While returning we stopped over at a pretty place called Gomango. I thought we’d stop at the inviting Sahakari Spice Farm at Curti (Ponda) for lunch – it has become a runaway success in spice tourism –  the place was crawling with foreign tourists who were being taken on a spice walk and then treated to an ethnic lunch treat. Because of Manuela they thought we were tourists and quickly garlanded us,  told us to settle down at a rustic arrangement of table and benches, served us coconut water. Hey, how much will this cost us, I quickly asked, and we were told that with or without the spice walk it would be Rs.300 per head.  I protested, “But we’re residents of Panaji and I’ve seen enough spice trees, can we skip the spice tour and just pay for lunch and run away?” Nope, it was a package deal, take it or leave it. We paid for the coconut water and left.

But I was intrigued enough to quickly look around at the prize spice farm of them all in Goa. Even purchased a packet of cumin seeds for Rs.50 (barely 100 g and I’m not sure if it is organically grown because there’s no labeling saying so). The other spices and spice oils were tempting but selling at a rip-off price…still, one of these days I must return to follow up on the Ayurvedic tips and hints which the farm is selling for a price (by way of cyclostyled literature at Rs.100) e.g. “Eating five curry leaves every morning for three months prevents diabetes due to heredity factors, Lime is an effective remedy for any type of allergy…take half-a-lime juice with a spoonful of honey in a glass of lukewarm water first thing in the morning for three months and get rid of all types of allergies…” And, “Powdered seeds of cardamom can be boiled in water with tea and taken to remedy mental depression. An apple can be taken with honey as one of the best remedies for depression…” And, “Cinnamon oil is widely known as a massage oil, also known as a magic oil…..” Blah, blah…not that some of it is may not be useful information, the efficacy of spices is very real, okay.

We had lunch in the shade of a garden at Gomango a little further up. Kingfisher beer for Manuela and Vishnu (who drives) and Chinese lunch. I ordered the best tandoori roti I’ve eaten in a long time, and plain palak. Very good natural curd in a pot. Truly, a blessed lunch. There’s an air-conditioned restaurant with a see-through kitchen (spanking clean, the only one of its kind in Goa I’m sure) but we’d preferred to eat looking at butterflies, trees and exotic Hawaiian hibiscus in the garden. It’s worth driving up all the way just to eat at Gomango. Thank me for introducing you to it here and I hope the prices don’t go up the next time we stopover! According to Director,  Dilip Kamat, the idea of setting up a restaurant here is basically to cater to the Kundaim Industrial Estate nearby where from the sound of it the blue-collar workers are suffering for want of decent food. The food at Gomango is more than decent, it’s first rate, as is the setting. One of these days….visit the zoo at Ponda and stop over at Gomango for a relaxing lunch.

Postscript: Ingo’s Saturday Night Market is back in bigger and better form for the season, cheers to that. 

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