Do Goans really want to become Portuguese citizens?

Mario Miranda's Goa

Suppose people from a poor third world country were given the option of being citizens of a rich first world country. Would they take it? Or leave it?

As a rule, people from poor third world countries don’t have the option of acquiring first world citizenship, so this remains a mostly theoretical question. Goa is an exception to this rule.

Goans who were Portuguese subjects before 1961, when India liberated Goa from the Salazar dictatorship, can choose to take a Portuguese passport. Their children and grandchildren can make the same choice. In effect, Goans who can trace their roots to colonial times can choose to be EU citizens.

How many of them have taken the option? My best estimate is about 15%.

I did a small poll of friends and family to guess this number among people I thought had enough context to hazard a guess. The range of guesstimates ranged from <1% to >80%. People like us don’t have an intuitive sense for a natural emigration rate.

My 15% estimate is a “soft” number because (surprisingly) there doesn’t seem to be any authoritative public data on this process. Google doesn’t throw up any crisp, credible results. Here is how I pieced together the estimate:

The most frequently quoted number in the press is that there are about 70,000 Goan-origin Portuguese citizens resident in Portugal, another 30,000 in the UK (as EU citizens before Brexit), and about 50,000 living in India (presumably on OCI visas). Adding these numbers up, it seems that about 150,000 Goans have opted for Portuguese citizenship.

How many Goans had the option?

Goa is tiny. Its population today is only about 1.5 million. This number includes migrants from the rest of India who settled in Goa after 1961, who are not eligible for a Portuguese passport.

The population of Goa in 1961 was just under 600,000. If that eligible population grew at a rate of ~1% per annum, about a 1 million would be eligible.

Taken together, it seems about 15% of eligible Goans chose EU citizenship. Or, 85% of those who could have moved from the third world to the first world chose to stay! My own guess was that at least 30% eligible Goans would have taken the EU passport because of the size-of-the-prize.

What is the size-of-the-prize these Goans are choosing not to take?

The chart below shows that trajectory of India and Portugal’s per capita GDP in today’s USD from 1961 onwards (sourced from the World Bank…btw, I love this online data visualization tool!).

At the time the Salazar dictatorship was thrown out of India, emigrating to Portugal was not that attractive. Portugal's per capita GDP was at USD 360 in today’s money. Portugal was basically just another third world dictatorship that happened to be in Europe.

However, after democracy was established in 1974, after Portugal joined the EU in 1986, income skyrocketed. Today Portuguese incomes are about USD 23,000 compared to Indian incomes of about USD 2,000.

Looking at the average Indian's income may be misleading. Goa is much more prosperous than the rest of India. Goa's per capita income is about USD 6000. After adjusting for purchasing power parity, that might mean emigration doubles real income rather than increasing it 10X. 

In general, demand for emigration vs. income follows an S shaped curve (first S shaped curve in the diagram). The promise of doubling income, off a relatively high base, clearly isn't enough to prompt a mass migration of the comfortably-off.

Migration is all about S shaped curves

Culture must also be a factor. Goans are stereotypically laid-back. They might care less about the extra income than other Indians. Most Goans don’t speak Portuguese. I can imagine that the psychic cost of learning a new language to gain a foothold in a new home must be daunting.

Perhaps the biggest factor limiting emigration is that many Goans have chosen to stay home.

This is certainly the most emotionally resonant factor for me, as a Tam Bram from Mylapore, Madras. I’d attended a school reunion in Chennai (nee Madras) a few years ago when only 2 out of the 75 science students from my class showed up. The rest were abroad. The large concentrations were in California, Texas and New Jersey. Another Tam Bram friend I was discussing this phenomenon with told me about his classmates from IIT-Roorkee. He is the only one, out of about fifty, who is still in India.

These people are not emigrating because of economic necessity. The quality of life they would have experienced in India was always going to be okay. A big part of the reason they emigrate is because others like them are also emigrating (this is the second S shaped curve on the diagram).

I guess that if enough people-like-us leave home, home doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. I guess its good that enough Goans are staying at home for Goa to still feel like Goa.

Paul Fernandes' Goa

Batting in the pink ball test at Motera should have been like batting against Kumble or Underwood. It was a test of traditional technique

Jonny Bairstow
Ducks in both innings @ Motera

India just beat England in the Motera test in under two days. What happened?

Having watched replays and commentaries over the weekend (because the live cricket is over), my takeaway is that bad batting happened.

Digging a little deeper…

Joe Root gave us the most cogent explanation for why the pink ball used in Ahmedabad behaved differently from the traditional red ball.
 
The pink ball seam is harder and therefore stands prouder. The thicker lacquer surface means the ball comes off the pitch more quickly, especially when the ball lands on the lacquer surface rather than on the seam. The ball also spins more or less depending on whether it lands on the seam or on the surface. This doesn’t mean that there is more spin on the pitch, or that it is two-paced. It does means there is more variation in the spin, and more variation in the pace at which the ball reaches the bat.
 
There is nothing specifically Indian/ sub-continental about this extra variation.
 
This is similar to how a ball would behave on a traditionally English “sticky wicket” drying off after summer rain. Derek “Deadly” Underwood would have reveled in the conditions at Motera.

"Deadly" Derek Underwood 
Would have loved bowling at Motera 

How did good batsmen counter this variation? With classic traditional technique.
 
Traditional batting technique was meant to deal with uncertainty. Well-schooled batsmen got right down to the pitch of the ball, got low, “smelt” the ball, kept their bat just in front of their front pad, played with a straight bat, through the line, into the V, smothered the spin on a good length, and scored big off long-hops that sat up to be thumped or half-volleys that never got the chance to deviate. Cutting off the stumps, sweeping on a length, hitting against the spin and playing from the crease - all behaviours that assume low uncertainty - were all considered bad batting.
 
A classically correct English batsman of an earlier generation, like Dennis Amiss, might have batted for hours at Motera. Sunny Gavaskar’s 96 against Pakistan in Bangalore was made in much more challenging conditions. Karnataka’s Brijesh Patel (long considered a better player of spin than even GR Vishwanath), or Tamil Nadu purists like V Sivaramakrishnan and TE Srinivasan would have been equipped to deal with the variation in both pace and speed. VVS Laxman, India’s fourth innings hero on so many occasions, would have done fine.
 
Today’s batsmen, our sixer-hitting reverse-sweeping galacticos, don’t seem to be equipped with these traditional virtues. Look at the way the top order batters got themselves out.
 
Kohli, Rahane and Foakes were out trying to cut length balls on the stumps. Anybody who has played Kumble could have told them that when the ball is turning just a bit and hurrying on to the stumps, playing horizontal bat shots is suicide.
 
Rohit Sharma and Jonny Bairstow were out sweeping for the length despite the line. Root was out LBW twice, rooted to his crease instead of either getting fully forward or back. Pant was out driving through the line of a ball that was just short of a drivable length. Shubman Gill was out trying to pull a short ball from well outside off. WTF?! 

Rohit Sharma was in charge, until he threw it away

It would be nice if our galacticos also learnt traditional batting, to supplement their sixer-hitting heroics.
 
There were also a surprisingly large number of good batters who missed straight balls. Zak Crawley (who played beautifully in the first innings) was bowled off the first ball he faced from Axar in the second. Pujara and Washington Sundar clean missed ordinary looking length balls from Leach and Root. This looks like batters aren’t sighting the pink ball, especially when they’re new to the crease.
 
That is not surprising. It takes literally years spent out in the middle for an international batter to train his vision to sight a cricket ball that’s dancing around in space. This training is cognitive more than optical. “Seeing the ball like a football” is a cognitive reality. It’s totally natural if a new colour tricks the eye/ mind, if it is harder to see a pink ball, and therefore impossible to “see the ball like a football”.
  
So where’s this going? What next? 

I think the Motera test is an argument for playing more pink ball cricket at the junior, domestic and limited over levels.
 
The ECB has mandated that each first-class county plays at least one pink ball game per year. If that doesn’t seem like a lot, here in India I don’t think any Ranji Trophy games use a pink ball. Without that experience, the next generation of players will also have to discover the pink ball only when they reach the international level.
 
If Root’s insight – that there is more uncertainty in the path of a pink ball than in either a red or white ball - is true, I especially like the idea of pink ball cricket in limited overs games. Test cricket is in perfectly good health (refer Brisbane 2021). Limited overs cricket needs to shift its balance of power to favour bowlers. Pink ball games might be a good way to do so.
 
Finally, from a purely parochial, partisan viewpoint, one positive thing that the “minefield” at Motera has resulted in is that the Poms are whingeing again.
 
Steve Waugh’s invincibles realised that the only way to beat India in India was by enforcing a strict no-whingeing rule. This was the discipline that enabled them to come back from the miracle of Kolkata in 2001, to conquer the final frontier in 2004.
 
During the first Chennai test I was a little worried that Root’s team had learnt from Waugh’s success, that they had trained their minds to enjoy playing in India. But now, with all the whingeing about the wicket, the umpires, the bio-bubble, the rotation policy, their Asian spinner Moeen Ali “choosing” to go home, etcetera, it feels a bit like the wheels are coming of the English bus.
 
England will now play the fourth and final test with both a series win and/ or a spot in the WTC finals out of reach. Are they proud enough to play with passion and purpose, in unquestionably tough conditions, when there is nothing except pride at stake? Or in other words, do they have the relentless intensity of Lloyd's Windies, Waugh's Aussies or Kohli's Indians? Let’s see.

The England Leadership Team
Do they have the hunger to fight on in the fourth test?

 

WandaVision: Another Retelling of Savitri-Satyavan

My family I are hooked on a TV miniseries called WandaVision. 

WandaVision is a part of the Marvel-verse - an alternative reality with many heroes and heroines who have amazing superpowers, whose narratives are all tangled together and sometimes inconsistent, where time and causality are fluid, where good characters sometimes discover the dark side within, but where the dividing line between good and evil is always discernible. 

Here is what I see going on in WandaVision. 

Wanda and Vision are a loving wife and husband. They live an idyllic suburban life in 1950s America, with a Chevrolet, a Frigidaire, chicken dinners and nosy neighbours. 

But that charming reality is not as it seems. 

In another greater reality, Wanda and Vision were Avengers! They were warriors for good fighting against evil. In this Avengers reality, Vision was killed on the battlefield. 

Wanda refused to give up on her fallen partner. 

Wanda used her superpowers to bring Vision back from the dead. 

Wanda created an alternative reality in which she and Vision could be united once more. 

So, WandaVision is about a strong virtuous woman with superpowers who brings her husband back from the dead. Where have I heard that before? 

In another magical alternative universe. In the alternative reality of Indian mythology, where many heroes and heroines have amazing superpowers, whose narratives are all tangled together and sometimes inconsistent, where time and causality are fluid, where good characters sometimes discover the dark side within, but where the dividing line between good and evil is always discernible.

Wanda's story is basically the Savitri-Satyavan story. 

Savitri was also a strong virtuous woman with superpowers who brought her husband Satyavan back from the dead. 

Savitri’s superpowers were her intelligence and devotion. Wanda’s superpowers include telekinesis, energy manipulation and neuroelectric interfacing. Sure, there are differences between the two characters, and the telling of the two stories. But if the two heroines were to meet, they would have plenty in common to talk about.

Savitri negotiating with Yama in
Raja Ravi Verma's Painting

"Winning Takes Care of Everything". By Tiger Woods, Barack Obama and Bhagavan Sri Krishna

Tiger Woods on the importance of winning

How far does one go to win? 

As far as one possibly can. 

Most sportsmen would agree with Tiger Woods on that point. 

Win gracefully if that is your style. Win ugly if not. Test the edges of the rules. Win! 

This might stick in the throat of nice, well brought up, middle class boys like this blogger. But fair enough. Tiger Woods is a pro. He is playing hardball. So are his competitors. Maybe winning does take care of everything. For Tiger. 

How well does that generalize? 

Depends. 

On how well winning is defined. And on how well-defined the rules are. 

In most walks of life both winning and the rules of play are very loosely defined. 

Barack Obama with Tim Kaine
On the importance of winning

So how hard does one play? 

Public life is a sphere where hardball might be a bad idea, where the unwritten rules are more important than in sports, where winning doesn’t take care of everything. 

So, it was interesting to learn that Nobel Peace prize laurate ex-President Barack Obama endorses hardball. 

Apparently he told Tim Kaine, then candidate Hillary Clinton’s VP nominee “Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You've got to keep a fascist out of the White House". 

Barack thinks that when the stakes are high, purity is less important than winning. 

This is not a recent question. 

Bhagavan Sri Krishna played hardball. 

Arjuna asked Bhagavan Sri Krishna about dharma at Kurukshetra. Bhagavan Sri Krishna replied with his actions. Whether it was forcing Karna to waste Indra’s Shakthi on Ghatothkacha, obscuring the sun with his Sudarshana-chakra so Arjuna could avenge Abhimanyu’s death, or orchestrating Yudhishthira’s only lie so Dhrishtadhyumna could kill Guru Dronacharya, Bhagavan Sri Krishna was willing to play hardball. The stakes were high enough to justify this. Winning mattered more than purity.

In contexts that are more important than sports, maybe winning doesn’t take care of everything. 

But winning does take care of a lot of things.

Bhagawan Sri Krishna with Arjuna
On the importance of winning