Christmas & Natalam
Sandesh Prabhudesai
24 December 2001
Dancing in the streets! That’s a new name
for Christmas nowadays in Goa.
Most of the tourists flock in during Christmas
season, roam all around on hired mobikes, sit till late night
in any beachside bar & restaurant and join the street
dance, organised by a local club or hotel with the bands playing
till dawn in the coastal village.
The names are many – Christmas Eve, Christmas
Ball, Seasonal Nights, New Year Eve and then the most exciting
New Year Night! It goes on at least for a week, or little
more than that. It’s a great fun in its own way.
The normal season that started since October
was quite demoralising for the tourism industry here, thanks
to the world recession and the WTC tragedy. But the Christmas
spirits are high, with the peak season gripping the coastal
state.
The sandy beaches and coconut groves are
seen excited with the usual enthusiasm to greet tourists from
all over the world. Well-known for their hospitality, Goans
are getting prepared to serve the tourists, as much as they
can.
The mood is upbeat in the coastal villages,
especially in the four talukas of the state. Bardez taluka
includes beaches like Baga and Calangute, Tiswadi is known
for a fabulous capital city of Panaji, Salcete locates magnificent
beaches like Colva and Benaulim and Mormugao, situating a
rustic port town of Vasco and an isolated beach like Bogmolo,
right below the Dabolim airport.
Some of these areas are however also getting
a bad name nowadays, due to open air rave parties being held
on village hillocks along the coastline, amidst playing full
blast Goa Trance, the loud music composed by the raves. Drugs
from Hashish-Charas to Ecstasy are distributed under cover,
but with the blessings of concerned authorities.
While such gatherings are organised in collusion
with local politicians, criminals like paedophiles have also
started looking at Goa as a safe place to carry out their
unnatural activities of child abuse. Street children of non-Goan
origin easily get attracted to small gifts like chocolates
and even a pair of shoes and then become victims of their
sadistic acts.
Obviously, after denying the facts for several
years initially, the NGOs have now succeeded in convincing
the authorities to put a stop to such illegal and criminal
activities as decent tourists have begun shying away from
Goa - once called the Paradise of Western India.
But much away from these commercialised festivities,
the locals still enjoy their traditional Christmas with same
old devotion and customs, though commercial flavour has pushed
the originality under carpet a bit at village level.
Street dances are organised, putting a label
of ‘traditional’ before that, though this traditionality is
not even three decade-old. It was much different in ‘70s,
even in the heart of Panaji. It was more for the locals than
the tourists.
"My childhood Christmas in Panaji was
like the city itself, a picture of simplicity and taste, with
an accent on the spiritual – interior joy and genuine fraternity",
says Prof Oscar de Noronha. His ancestral house on the banks
of river Mandovi is nowadays surrounded with all kind of street
dances, playing loud amplified music throughout the night.
He remembers those days, when festive feeling
in the capital set in with the novena of Goencho Saib
– St Francis Xavier – whose feast at Old Goa on 3rd
December is still the biggest feast of the state, right from
the time then Portuguese rulers started it - almost three
centuries ago.
After rushing through greeting cards, spring-cleaning
the house, decorating the pine tree branch as the Christmas
tree and setting up the crib by sowing nachne at least
a week in advance so that it grows five inches tall, Noronha
remembers those peaceful evenings, carolling house-to-house
jingling all the way.
Nora Secco de Souza, the famous columnist
who has already crossed 80 by now, remembers even the Christmas
of pre-liberation era. Making sweets itself was a big feast
in the house, she recalls, remembering ‘cunsuada’ (Christmas
sweets), consisting of variety of dainties like orehs,
mandarehs, neuris, goss, kul-kuls etc – all made mostly
of wheat and rice flour, jaggery, sugar and coconut.
It was a lengthy ritual making special delicacies
like dodol – a mixture of flour, jaggery, coconut juice
and cashew nuts and bebinca – consisting of egg yolks,
four, sugar, ghee and coconut milk. The process of days together
baking it on charcoals is part of history now, also hearing
about the mouth-watering taste as a fairy tale.
"With the moon above, t he brooding
beauty of the countryside and the holy silence and peace of
the night, it is a musical feast to tune in at your window
or balcony, to tinkling guitars, singing violins, soft mandolins
playing, while haunting voice sings seducing fados
(Portuguese love songs) as well as the latest popular numbers",
recalls de Souza.
Going down the memory lane, she also recalls
Christmas dances. "Friends, neighbours and relatives
gather together for a musical session of soul-soothing mandos
(folk songs). The entire company sings and claps hands by
way of keeping time to the best of the batuques (drums)
while violins call out the Mando tempo, and soon you will
find both young and old taking to the floor".
It is a tired but happy crowd that finally
decides to go home with a loud and fervent Deu bori rat
dium (God give thee a good night), she picturises it,
each carrying an empty coconut shell with a piece of candle
fixed inside as a beacon to guide them homewards. And thus
ends another natal (Christmas) with its message of
peace and goodwill prevailing.
Nowadays, besides tourism industry, it’s
a season also for the orthopaedics and neurosurgeons. Maximum
road accidents and deaths are reported on Goan roads during
this week as the concept of sipping drinks has overtaken by
boozing and rash riding. Equally large number of drowning
cases are also reported, mostly tourists, leaving a big black
dot on every Christmas season that comes...deadly !
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