The mere mention of jackfruit stirs fond childhood memories of Goan summers. The baby jackfruit meant breakfast to us brats unshackled from the tyranny of the school year. You slit the fruit open with your hands, scooped up the fleshy nuggets and then spat out the seed. The Konkani word for jackfruit is the same…
In one short verse, the great Goan poet Bakibab Borkar (1910-1984) captured the essence of what it means to be Goan1: Please Sir, God of Death Don’t make it my turn today, not today There’s fish curry for dinner. [1] Great Goans by Mario Cabral e Sa and Lourdes Bravo Da Costa, N.N.A.P. Publications, 1991….
One of the very few surviving structures of Goa‘s Muslim era, the Safa Shahouri mosque in the town of Ponda was built in 1560 during the reign of Ibrahim Adilshah, sultan of Bijapur. The photograph below was shot on a serene winter morning in 2007. Notice the Goan touch, such as the tiled roof and…
Arabó is a tiny ward of the village of Dhargal on River Chapora in north Goa. The name, a Goanized form referring to “Arab,” furnishes a clue to its past. Arab merchants sailed here in their dhows in mediæval times trading goods with the locals. It is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of place, a sleepy outlier…
A tortuous mountain pass wends into the farm of Njarðvík near Borgarfjörður Eystri in the East Fjords of Iceland. PS: There are no snakes in Iceland.
