Brodick’s Janice will take her bike to Bengal to help Dr. Graham’s Homes

Brodick postmistress Janice Small is preparing for a 415-mile bike ride in the Himalayas.

Janice said: ‘In February, I am heading to West Bengal, with a cycling group led by the Reverend John Webster from Kings Cross.

‘Our aim is to cycle, over 7 days, from Kolkata, in the south, to Kalimpong 415 miles to the North and 4500 feet up in the foothills of the Himalaya. We will spend 5 nights under canvas.’

All the sponsorship money that is raised will go towards the Dr Graham’s homes for destitute Indian children.

After reading an article in The Arran Banner in April 2006 about John Webster’s cycle through India Janice knew she had to get involved.

Janice explained: ‘When I read this article, at the time, it made a huge impression on me so when I saw John’s advert looking for cyclists for 2008 I was immediately hooked.

‘I think it will be a marvelous experience, some good, some bad, extremely arduous, unforgettable but very rewarding as the end result will be helping, through donors, the children of the home.’

She will be expected to meet all personal costs herself but has to raise a minimum of £1000 in aid of Dr Graham’s Homes in Kalimpong.

This home was founded in 1900 for destitute Anglo-Indian children to help them to a fuller life of love, security and education.

‘To help meet my target I am doing a bag pack in the Co-op on Saturday December 1’, Janice said, ‘Please come along and support me.’

In order to prepare for the hard journey Janice has been cycling as much as possible.

She told The Arran Banner: ‘I have been cycling for a number of years now, around Arran and a few runs on the mainland.

In September, with my friend Linda Murchie, I took part in Pedal for Scotland, a charity run between Glasgow and Edinburgh. I raised over £300 for Diabetes Scotland.

‘I can cycle the distance required every day, between 45miles and 80miles, but it is doing it every day that will be hard.

‘To keep fit I am out on my bike every weekend and during the week when possible.

‘I have also started going up to Auchrannie gym where Lynn Boal is advising me.’

The trip will mark the beginning of Janice’s retirement from the Brodick post office.

She added: ‘I have sold the lease on Brodick Post Office and this trip leaves a week after I retire.

A bit tight but what a challenge to the start my retirement.’

Young Man Behaving Badly

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18lives-t.html?ref=magazine

The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and without any intimations of my own ludicrousness spent two years showing God what I thought of him by letting myself go. I drank and took drugs sufficient to give me bleeding gums and a Parkinsonian head wobble, conditions that compromised but did not prevent my other main hobby — having sex as often as possible. A lot of girls didn’t mind. A lot of them had troubles of their own. It was a cheering surprise, the sort of dismal shape you could be in and still get into some maenadic self-harmer’s pants. Granted, these encounters never developed — no morning-after breakfast or fun in the shower — but encased as I was in the armor of nihilism, I wouldn’t have stuck around for any of that rubbish anyway.

For the minimum-wager with Caligulan needs, the glory days are soon over. In two brief years of beyond-means living, I went from being more or less viably broke to being tremblingly, authentically in debt. Also, I filled in the alcoholic’s questionnaire and discovered that apparently I was one.

I wrote to my father and asked him for a loan. This doesn’t sound so bad. But only a month earlier he sent me a gift of £500, part of the yield of one of the ancient insurance policies he was in the habit of disbursing among his children.

After an ominous pause the old man wrote back: yes, he’d give me the money, but he wanted to see me. I was being formally summoned to the parental seat (a one-bedroom retirement flat in Bolton) because manifestly Something Was Seriously Wrong.

My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I’m the only one who wasn’t born in India. Thus the mythic shadow under which I grew up was a narrative of flight and exile, the Indian glory of Those Days (moonlit dances, bootleg liquor, elephants, tigers, steam trains and servants) set against the English dreariness of These Days (miserable weather, poverty, lousy fresh fruit and consistent hostility from the natives). A fertile story, yes — but theirs. I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

In Bolton my father and I drank whiskey while he gave me the what-in-God’s-name-are-you-doing-with-your-life? dressing down I’d expected. It generated a peculiar psychic response. On the one hand: Wow, this is my dad talking. Better shape up. On the other: Who do you think you are — my dad? My mother got the curry and rice ready in the kitchen. What are your plans, for God’s sake? the old man demanded. What is it you want to do?

To this day I’m not sure why I answered that I was planning a trip to India. I certainly hadn’t been planning a trip to India, or anywhere else. My dad was initially incredulous — India? You haven’t got any money — but within seconds he segued with protean ease into wild-eyed enthusiasm, got out maps, started drawing up itineraries, calling the roll of friends we’d visit. It had become “we”; he would accompany me. It was while I was still reeling from the shock of his self-invitation that he fessed up to losing his eyesight. He wanted to show me the old country while he still could.

In India, I watched him among friends he hadn’t seen for 35 years. A glamour of England he didn’t know he’d acquired made many of them tentative and subdued. He ran his hands over stone walls, doorways, gravestones. The small changes pierced him; in the face of the big ones he lost his bearings. He took my arm to cross the roads. We had frank conversations on the chilly night trains, became people to each other, aside from father and son.

At the end of it all the two of us stood at the National Express bus stop at Heathrow waiting for his ride back to Bolton. It was cold, windy, raining. We were both suffering from the need to say something in keeping with the scale of what we’d been through. Quite a problem, considering his default of emotional understatement and mine of lapsing into a crying jag at the first sign of human warmth. Standing there with his collar up and his left eye watering, he looked older than I’d ever seen him look. The bus arrived. We embraced, still reaching for something to say. In the end he just said, “Thanks for looking after me.”

I think that was the first time I realized the balance of strength between us had shifted. What had started as me asking him for help ended with him thanking me for helping him. I was a young man, and he was old. It was my world now, not his. I resolved to get my life in order, quit being a waster, do something with my time instead of (or at least as well as) boozing and fornicating it away.

Glen Duncan lives in London and has written six novels. His most recent, “The Bloodstone Papers,” was published in August.

Might bring back some memories – St. Thomas School, Kolkata

Carnival time

St Thomas School turned 219 this year and the school’s birthday was celebrated with its annual carnival — one of the oldest in the city — on November 16-17 at the St Thomas Girls School. Bishop Samuel Raju, chairman of the board of governors, St Thomas School, Kidderpore, inaugurated the two-day event.

The ground was decked up for the carnival, sporting 11 stalls that offered games like ‘Basket the Ball’ to ‘Bounce the Lucky Score’. Students from the middle section were busy playing the bowling game.

But the stall that saw the maximum rush was the one holding ‘Treasure Hunt’. Beautiful handicrafts created by the school students were on display at these stalls, with just the right prices for student pockets. A technical stall offering information on a Welder training course, computer hardware and networking, conducted in collaboration with Jadavpur University, saw enough interest.

But what’s a carnival without some mouth-watering food? From kati rolls to biryani, the St Thomas School carnival served it all up hot, with the sales proceeds going to the school welfare fund. “The fund’s resources are used for under-privileged children of the school,” said Usha Andrews, acting principal of St. Thomas Boys school.

The Mixed Bloods of Goa written by Sylvester da Cunha

The mixed-bloods of Goa
They were fair-skinned and light-eyed, fluent in both Portuguese and Konkani. Were they European? “No”. Goan? “No.” they would vehemently assert. “We are of Portuguese origin.” They were the mistiços – part Goan, part Iberian. Much like the Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Burmese and burghers of Ceylon, they considered themselves separate and superior to the locals, while the latter held them in contempt. “The mistiços liked to be called “descendente” or “descending from the Portuguese”. The Goans remained unimpressed, though a few were genuinely so, like the ‘domiciled’ English of India.
Origin of the species
Says scholar Mariano Dias: “A paucity of ladies to service the gentry of Old Goa prompted 16th century Portuguese kings to ship out parentless girls, dubbed ‘Orfãs de Rei’ (King´s orphans). That’s how the early mixed-bloods came about. But, they were hardly enough girl-orphans to meet the demand of the teeming Portuguese. A lot of miscegenation occurred between Portuguese troops and European adventureres with Indian women of easy virtue (nautch girls of yore). Even in those times, mistiços were discriminated against by the official structures. The early Church is believed to have refused then admission into priesthood.”
Mistiços may have had their origins on the wrong side of the bed, but later they solemnized wedlock among themselves, taking on distinctive surnames like Pegado, Possolo and Vidigal.
Never more than a few thousand, they were largely employed in the colonial administration-police, customs, public works, navigation etc. Jobs assured, most of them didn’t take education seriously and lived merrily for the day.
Mixed bag
But it would be unfair to label the entire community as being “spoilt and irresponsible”. Many were well-educated and cultured. Dr. Germano Correia was the celebrated professor of the Goa Medical College, an intellectual giant with an impressive literary output. Vasco Ferreira Martins was the all-powerful Director of the Goa Fazenda (Revenue Department) whose administrative efficiency is remembered even today. Dr. Adolfo Costa was a leading medical doctor. And there were very many others.
Nasty
At the end of the spectrum was the notorious Casmiro Monteiro, boss of Police headquarters in the 50’s. Those were the years when a repressive Salazar sensed the breeze of independence blowing over Goa. An iron fist would descend at the merest whiff of Indian nationalism. Monteiro planted his spies in almost every town and village. They eavesdropped on conversations in buses, ferries, shops and bazaars. Innocent mentions of ‘Gandhi’, ‘Nehru’ or ‘India’ would instantly de reported and the speaker detained for questioning. Even a ‘namaste’ in jest could land the folded hands into scalding water.
Ilidio Costa (now President of the Clube de Tennis, Gaspar Dias), together with Ernesto Costa Frias, were arrested by Monteiro’s thugs in connection with bombings in several parts of Goa in 1956. Mr Costa was a member of the pro-independence Azad Gomantak Party. Monteiro fabricated a case on the grounds of young Mr. Costa’s family managing mines that used explosives. He was tortured for 4 months in the Panjim Quartel. “It was hell”, recalls Mr. Costa wryly. Beatings, 24-hours forced standing and other horrors. I’d rather not talk about it now.
“We were transferred and tried in the military Aguada Fort. The Portuguese judge hearing our case didn’t share Salazar’s colonial attitudes. But during the proceedings, he received a parcel bomb which blew off some of his fingers. He was flown to Portugal for repair and recuperation. meanwhile the trial was kept pending. On his return 2 years later he acquitted the accused for lack of eveidence.
One up for the Portuguese judge. Two down for Monteiro.
At Goa’s independence, almost all the descendentes followed the departing Portuguese to colonial jobs in Africa and the Asia. Today, some return as tourists, curious to visit their roots. They are welcomed.
The above article was contributed by Mark Pinto

Outing an Indian

http://www.littleindia.com/news/128/ARTICLE/1930/2007-11-02.html

The renowned British comedian and theater actor Alistair McGowan has outed himself as an Indian in a BBC documentary “Who Do You Think You Are.”

Alistair McGowan as Dot Cotton in East Enders

McGowan, who stars as Dot Cotton in the acclaimed BBC series the “East Enders,” said his Indian heritage was hidden from him by his father all his life. McGowan, 43, discovered his identity accidentally only after his death in 2003, when he searched for his father’s birth certificate to secure a certification of his death. The actor wrote in the Sunday Times: “On the 74-year-old slip of paper, under the word ‘caste,’ was the term ‘Anglo-Indian.”

Alistair McGowan undertaking a journey to his roots in India

McGowan had never known his grandparents who died before he was born. His father was the product of an alliance between his grandfather John McGowan and Maria de la Cruz, an Indian woman from Kolkata, which was not uncommon in the colonial era. However, given Britain’s colonial legacy, many Anglo Indians hid their racial identity, McGowan’s father among them.

Country Roads to travel back in time

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kolkata/Country_roads_to_travel_back_in_time/articleshow/2593345.cms

KOLKATA: Country roads will take them home this winter. The city’s Anglo-Indians wish for a tryst with yesterday, and what better way of doing so than lilting country music, humming along to John Denver?

‘Let’s Go Country’: Come Sunday, this musical extravaganza at the St Joseph’s College will transport one and all to the ’60s and ’70s when youths had sunshine on their shoulders as they strummed guitars and shook a leg to eternal country favourites.

It’s not very long ago, when the film, Bow Barracks Forever, portrayed the exclusive world of Anglo-Indians in the heart of bustling Kolkata, trying to keep alive their hopes, dreams, aspirations and, above all, their identity. And now, the Anglo-Indians will be saying it with music by linking local singers like Francis Lepcha to Lobo, Shon Anderson to John Denver, Jeff Culladon to Hank Locklin, The De’Souza Fly to Kenny Rogers and so on.

“Most Anglo-Indians grew up with country music. They would relate to cowboys, action and shooting. Unfortunately, we don’t get to hear this music anymore. So, we thought it would be a good idea to relive the past,” said Neville McNamara (58), member of the Anglo-Indian Society. Kanchan Dutta of Inner Circle, which is organising the event, thought it would not be fair to restrict Kenny Rogers, John Denver and the like to the city’s Anglo-Indians only.

Picking the greatest country songs was a tall order, but the pursuit was indeed rewarding in one major way, admitted the organisers. “Our selection will be a powerful reminder of the main strength of country music, which is its ability to tell a story. And, great country songs manage to tell a story in just a few words, in the process of creating a believable world, one that’s peopled with genuine characters, who evoke deep, credible emotions,” said McNamara.

The selection includes the MacGuire and Andrew Sisters, Hank Locklin, Skeeta Davis and Don Williams. It would be more like a cultural revelation, a unifying activity which will bring all like-minded people under the umbrella of John Denver. This, say the organisers, was their very own concoction of Bow Barracks and Bong Connection.