rewans The ea aig he Portuguese epic writer, Luis de Camées, whose fa- ther had died in Goa, he too reached there as an exile in 1553. He de- scribed Goa he saw as a biblical Babylon, a chaotic place where evil pros- pered and goodness suf- fered (“mal se afinae bem se dana”). We wonder if things have changed for better or worse since then. He also wrote in a sonnet about Time (tempo) that times change, and so do our wills (mudam-seos tem- pos, mudam-se asvon- 7 tades). Nowadays, itis the Camdes, —Goans who look for Por- forever short tuguese passports and exile themselves, of cash, Camées, forever short scrounged for 9fc2sh, scrounged for his mi ..,___ living with part time oc- his living with — cupations, like writing let- ‘i ters for the unlettered parttime — portuguese, and a tempo- occupations, rary job as State procura- 1 ae tor of the deceased with like writing an insignificant pay. He letters for the 28 often accused of liv- ing from loans which he unlettered rarely repaid. On comple- tion of three years of his Portuguese exile he got himself. ap- hnipluwepaperoheraldoinDetalsprir.aspx?id= 144048boxid= 162738764 Detaisprint proved it earlier by blast- ing the statue of Manuel Antonio de Sousa in Ma- pusa town, Much of the history is made of unintended con- sequences, and very little of it results from our in- tended or planned ac- tions. Reflection on this issue could help many to avoid jumping from the frying pan into fire. For those who believe that no amount of reflection or wisdom from hindsight will save us from our karma, we could listen to Pandit J. Nehru, who wrote in his Glimpses of World History (1934) that the Hindu “concept of karma was generally mis- understood as fatalism. He compared karma to the game of cards: Life conditions have distrib- uted the cards differently to each one, but the final result need not depend upon cards we get, but how intelligently we play them out. Human nature is a mix of rationality and animal- ity in a varying propor- tion and at an uneven pace, interspaced with mutations and quagmires. This is admitted even by the ardent believers when they are confronted with scandals linked with their practices. After all we are human, and hence, falli- ble. Curiously, this admis sion is often forgotten, if not rejected, when rival interests cite the same ar- gument, and get branded EGGS Times change and so do our wills [http://bitly/1RGsf3X]. The Catholic Church also blessed the Iberian Discoveries and collabo- rated with the European colonialism as a means to respond to the biblical call to go to the end of the earth and baptize the infi- dels, Following decolo- nization, the Church convoked Vatican I Coun= cil to change its discourse and practices that identi- fied the Church as a fifth column of the European world domination which laid the foundations of the modern capitalism, Better late than never, Pope Francis has gone further and denounced the capi- talism as the dung of the devil. Times change, wills change. The dialectic of inner contradictions studied by Hegel as the “cunning of reason’, but applied by Karl Marx to history as di- alectic materialism and class struggle, is like a screw-spring that ensures the continuity of the evo- lution of the humankind through turns and twists. My Uk-based nephew Steven D'Souza, a young and promising manage- ment guru, has explored this line ‘of argument imaginatively in his recent book co-authored. with Diana Renner, “Not Know- ing: The art of turning un- certainty into possibility’. Hence, never a certainty. [heep://aman.to/1RGSO4q, The Western claims of 1reves a bE pointed as judge of or- phans in Macau, but soon decided to return to Por- tugal and present his epic to the king. His travails did not end during his life time. More recently in 1980, a bigger than life-size statue of Camées, installed in Old Goa, was vandalized by Goan freedom fighters, who by ignorance or mal- ice, accused the poet of calling the Indians. dogs (cies). In reality, he was referring to “cas’, plural of a Portuguese corruption of Khan, like Adil Khan {Idalcdo}. His statue is now safe in the archeolog- ical museum, protected from sun and crow-shit. Probably the ire of the freedom fighters needed explosives, not semantic clarifications. ‘They had InipluwepaperoheraldoinDetalsprir.aspx?id= 144048boxid= 162738764 Detaispie as the axis of evil. President Bush was not the first to identify an axis of evil and destroy Iraq. Centuries before him, St Augustine, who figures high among the Fathers of the Church, declared that the Donatists in his home country in Africa were heretics and axis of evil. He then proceeded to de- dre that evil had no right to exist, and called upon the Roman troops to wipe them out. The Catholic Church is also known for having preached crusades to de- stroy the occupants of the Holy Land. It blessed the Inquisition and condoned its ugly procedures dur- ing centuries. Probably Martin Luther was not en- tirely in reacting with pu- ritan anger and describing the Catholic Church as Devil's Whore Enlightenment and Progress generated by scientific thought and In- Gustrial Revolution, have seen their downside in large-scale social convul- sions that are still ongo- ing, and threaten to engulf the humanity into yet an- other World War, with cold wars in between. Anold Konkani proverb conveys graphically the futility of our achieve- ments and the uncer- tainty in our lives: Zaite somdir utorlo ani kott'ten nak —buddoun melo (crossed many oceans and died drowned in a co- conut shell). In traditional Goa the poor and beggars were served liquor in a coconut shell. (Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Histori- cal Research, Goa (1979-1994).