George Menezes

I owe it to readers of GOA TODAY to explain my “status”, as it were. What kind of a Goan do I represent when I write for Goan journals?
For one thing, it would help in putting what I have to say in the right context.
As would be evident, I am not a tourist (foreign or desi) staying in a five star hotel where you can pick up the phone, dial Room Service, House Keeping or Reception and get your smallest needs taken care of.
I am also not an Indian tourist, whose weekend trip revolves around ogling semi-nudes on the beaches, sight-seeing old churches and temples and getting too drunk on a mixture of rum, beer and feni to give a damn about anything.
Regrettably, I am not a permanent resident of Goa. Those wonderful martyrs whose sound of music and merriment cannot conceal their body language of decades of frustrated resignation to the non-performance of their elected representatives and their bureaucrats.
Nor am I a resident Hippie, whose smoke-filled existence is oblivious to the changes of time, tide and temperature.
I belong to the category of Goans who own houses, ancestral or new, in Goa and who come down regularly (every other month) not merely to recharge our batteries and clear the pollution from our systems, but to honestly give back whatever little we can to the land of our ancestors. A workshop for professors and headmasters; growth-labs for the younger generation, management consultancy for industrial and service organisations; and a “column” here and there for local journals.
Above all, we come back lo keep in touch with our roots. Going by my experience in the last few years, let me say quite frankly, that getting in touch with my roots is more painful and more expensive than getting in touch with my root canal.
In some of the workshops I conduct, I use an instrument designed by Prof Pradip Khandwalla to measure the participants’ level of fears. One such fear is the “fear of ambiguity”. Prof Khandwalla calls it the “allergy to ambiguity”. This fear arises from the high need for certainty. The need for everything to go according lo a plan, for things to automatically fall into place. On the other side of the scale is, of course, chaos.
That would describe life in Goa. Chaotic. You can be certain of nothing. Death on the road, perhaps. And may be taxes. And the poder on his bicycle with his musical “wake-up call”. Nothing else. Of the many uncertainties, the one that affects Goans in my category is the uncertainly of power-supply .
Will there be power at all? For how many days in succession? If only for a few days, will there be power for the full day? Half a day? For one hour? For half an hour…? Will there be power in one phase, two phases? What will the fluctuations in the voltage be? For how long?
If the Lord of Power Supply has a time table, can I have a copy so that I can plan my life in its simplest detail…?
What am I asking for anyway? A couple of hours to use my electric type writer or computer, water pumped into the overhead tank to provide a shower, a refrigerator that will keep the fish fresh, the milk usable and the “urrak” chilled? A ceiling fan to lull me to sleep while the “Good Knight” gadget keeps the mosquitoes (and malaria) away?
In the towns I have lived all these, almost, three score years and ten, all I had to do is to learn to press the switch and, not too often, to replace the fuse. Or I ask my neighbour to replace the fuse. In Goa nothing as simple or definite can be undertaken. In a misplaced moment of liberality with funds, our residential complex at Verem got the electrical cables put underground. “A wet leaf, an overfed crow causes the cables in our complex to snap,” we said.
The cables in our complex are strong and firm underground, but they keep snapping in hundreds of other places on the way to us. No power.
A couple of villa owners installed small generators. Every time the power goes off they get out of bed, pick up a torch and go to the generator-shed outside the house and are about to switch it on when the power returns. You can spend the whole night doing this just to get a fan functioning over your bed and the “Good Knight” gadget keeping the mosquitoes at bay. One is thankful for the unplanned aerobics exercise one gets jumping and running to the generator and back.
As we soon discover, “power supply” is a prima donna. You have to cater to her many whims and fancies. The inconsistency in the voltage – which jumps from one extreme to another like a malarial fever or the performance of the United Front cabinet – requires the purchase of stabilisers for each one of your precious gadgets or, if you are filthy rich or foolish or both to invest Rs. 50,000 in an inverter, huge batteries and all.
But you have under estimated the Prima-donna. Some have menopause. Ours has “phases”. These change like the phases of the moon but unfortunately without the reliable time table of the moon. This calls for a blue box called the phase distributor, which distributes power through the 3 phases if one fails.
The final test is whether your stubborn tubelight is working.
All is now well, when there is power, when there is none and when it works whimsically. The only trouble is that the gadgets have occupied all the space in your house and you either return to Mumbai or move into Cidade de Goa Beach Resort and run programmes for its managers.
Or you stay in your gadget-filled villa and have nightmares about maintenance. Any electrical-electronic engineer willing to be my son-in-law?