FN

In recent months, here's a listing put together by me of electronic mailing lists that are playing a useful role (I think) in India http://wikiwikiweb.de/MailingListsInIndia.

Also, I managed to resuscitate the GoaJourno mailing list via GoogleGroups, while am rebuilding the India-EJ network there, together with Education-India. Wish me luck.

Check this new site -- with some links -- called http://goa1556.goa-india.org

Launched on a rainy day (June 20, 2007), Goa, 1556 is more an idea than anything else. The concept: Goa Reader is a planned series of texts, that explore diverse aspects of Goa, and the influence of this tiny region in diverse pockets of the globe. The first deals with the media in Goa. This Goa Reader's diverse views on the media, seek to deepen understanding of one crucial aspect of the complex region that is Goa.

Goa: Roughly just a one-thousandth part of India (in landmass and population), Goa has played a role far bigger than its size. In the history of South Asia, and in trade, emigration, and in the achievements of her people. This meeting-point (or, clashing-point) of cultures and one-time emporium of the East, is much more than just a tourist destination, as the current-day powerful image suggests.

In April 2007, just before a longish trip to .Au, I edited Domnic Fernandes' "Domnic's Goa" for my Cecil Pinto's Abe Faria Productions. This was a job I thoroughly enjoyed (even if it involved a bit of a struggle mastering Lyx, very useful software once you know it somewhat). Domnic's writing on Goa is very different from the nostalgia-for-the-past fuelled elitist writing that dominates the perspectives of most writers on Goa. Worth reading -- and I say so not because of my involvement with the book!

Some comments on a recently-published essay, part of Jerry Pinto's Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa (Penguin Books): "Teotonia R. de Souza's profile of the little-known ‘opium smuggler who tried to liberate Goa' is as captivating as Frederick Noronha's portrait of Abbé Faria, eighteenth-century priest, mesmerist and revolutionary, and one of the region's most famous sons." And, Karishma Attari's review in The Hindustan Times titled Furious and funny in Goa: "Every anthology has its strong leaders and its stragglers. Not every piece in this compilation is a winner. Adil Jussawalla’s delicious diary entry is at odds with the dispassionate, somewhat boring account of Noronha’s hypnotist-priest...." Finally, Peter Nazareth's comment on the NewDiaspora mailing list which says this: "The book looks like a personal exploration of Goa by Jerry Pinto from Bombay (Mumbai), and he has a two-page "intuitive" introduction -- not surprising since he is a poet. So the review was wrong to underrate it: and speaking of the review being wrong, I found Fred Noronha's search for Abbe Faria to be fascinating, not boring--it is one of the best things I have read by Fred." So... take your pick!

Three articles available online: this article is from the 'nineties and about language politics in Goa, Of Forked Tongues and the Mother Tongue -- Language in Goan Politics. This is a 2004 interview with an editor (Tarun Tejpal, prior to the inauguration of his print weekly... still an interesting read) whose work I respect, The Press must represent the public. And here's a reference to a chapter in a slim book Frog Books launches Urban Voices, two other books.

Thanks to the broadband link (finally, after 12 painful years of slow pay-by-minute dial-up from Saligao, sometimes via Bombay, and then unlimited-use dial-up), have been able to upload most of my photos to my page on Flickr.com. Bosco D'Mello was generous enough to gift me a huge quota of space for monthly uploads (2GB, more than I can use... mostly).

I pay back by sharing my photos. To be honest, I couldn't care less (provided these are used for non-commercial purposes and with attribution). Some rights reserved, as the CreativeCommons.org approach would say.

But if you try to wrest control, claim copyright, and try to make me sign some legalise-filled contract that deprives me and the commons of further use of these photos... then, don't even bother to discuss. Everything else (almost) is negotiable.

My URLs have changed in recent months. Thanks to all who made it possible (particularly Chris Wilson and Derek Cordeiro). So my blogs are mostly at http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com and on http://southasiaict4d.wordpress.com/ which I maintain with Karachi-based colleague Reba Shahid. My dream is to get this http://elearning.goa-india.org/ e-learning network up... possibly with others who are convinced joining hands to create it.

Something written on FOSS.in, the annual Bangalore-based event on Free/Libre and Open Source Software in India. Except that this year seems to suggest that the six-year-old event is growing in significance. And it's being getting appreciated more. Here's the link to the entire story Mobility, web services, and kernel development: open source innovations at the FOSS.in conference ... from LinuxWorld.com

Don't ask me what I'm doing on GAID... but I'm there. Name misspelt too; what's new! Life is unfair... those who deserve don't get it. And... anyway, wish something relevant could come out of this. Is that asking for too much? Travel isn't an end in itself, of course. And too much of it simply means you can't do what you should be.

Of the mailing list involved in, you could say I'm biased in favour of a few. Why? Because they worked well (perhaps beyond my expectations, and in ways one didn't deserve). Take a look at my favourites -- BytesForAll_Readers of course (set up by Partha Sarkar), Docuwallahs2 (inspiired by K Stalin's now uncontrollable Docuwallahs), and ILUG-Goa (started by Arvind Yadav). In fact, I'm beginning to like some of the smaller but promising lists too, like Education-India and even the small but meaningful GoaMusician list.

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[By Frederick Noronha] If you came across Verapaneni Brahmanandrao Anand, the name wouldn't strike you as familiar. But when a slim South Indian was introduced to me at V.B.Anand -- outside that age-old resource of reading material, Varsha Book Stall in Panjim -- the name immediately struck a bell. My mind immediately went back to all those scenic picture post-cards I had come across years ago. This was a photographer one was just waiting to meet.

Some tracks on the Net: Goa photopages,
The Technology Empowerment Network, an inspiring subject (FN on FarmMedia ...I often find writing on such topics meaningful), being cited in an African debate, and on IslamOnline.net.

Since I'm keen about following the Free Software (and Open Souce) movement in India, this is a set of links to varioius user-groups.

Soc.culture.indian.goa is a Usenet newsgroup, which I was involved in setting up. It runs. Hopefully, it will remain as an archive for news and information related to Goa, over a longish period of time.

Here's my profile on Blogger.com, which links to the blogs I'm currently working on. Blogger, while not being Free Software-based, is an easy to use tool. Check it out. You can set up your own blog in two to three minutes! My goal is to encourage more young people like Riza and Isabel to have their own blogs.

This is the first-ever issue of BytesForAll's email newsletter, archived online by the Inti.be website. Says this page: "Find here Frederick Noronha's bYtES For aLL historical, first newsletter: Issue No 1 * July 1999 (which) was predominantly oriented to the Indian internet scenery. Located at Goa in India, Frederick Noronha had compiled a rather comprehensive list of Indian WWW addresses.... Fre

Some of my photos are here: quite a few from Flickr.com and the Yahoo collection (few). You can also search Google images and find images, some of which are related to me. If you'd like to access my other photos, write to me. Many are in a copylefted, attribution, non-commercial CreativeCommons.org license.

Some earlier articles on Outlook.

Recent article on blogging in India, etc on GlobalVoicesOnline.org.

Some of my links to Wikipedia, a fascinating collaboratively-written encyclopaedia which I support. FN