Children Activities

At a particular time of the year, rain clouds roll overhead and water the land of Goa heralding the monsoon season. As beautiful as this season is, some ingredients and other things aren’t available at that time. Many locals of Goa start collecting twigs, wood, and coconut shells, and carry it home to use as firewood before the rains hit. Sheryl Gonsalves | NT GoGoaNow Here are some other ways Goans deal with the rainy season:- – Chillies: Drying red chillies (Kashmiri, musureo, Moira chillies) in the sun and storing them. – Coriander seeds/ jeera/ turmeric: Mix salt and water in a vessel. Put the coriander seeds in that water and mix well. Take it out from the water and leave it in the sun to dry. You can do the same with jeera (cumin) and whole haldi. This is to avoid insects from attacking it during the moist rainy weather. – Dry seafood: Goans store dry fish and dry prawns as there may be fish scarcity during the monsoons. – Pulses: They dry pulses like beans (vousane) and small white beans (meerulio) in the sun. – Tamarind: Remove the tamarind seeds and discard, apply salt, and pound a little […]

Music is a language everybody understands. Alvaro Pereria, the musician who has helped boost classical Western music in Goa, talks to NT GoGoaNow about his days during the past few weeks. Sheryl Gonsalves – NT GoGoaNow This Goa State Cultural Award holder spent his days mostly playing badminton, reading, and practicing classical music. He was supposed to perform at a music concert in June but it had to be called off due to the pandemic. “We worked on a whole new Schubert trio (for the concert) to try something new. It takes more than forty minutes to perform,” Alvaro reveals. They also practiced Beethoven pieces and a Mozart trio. Alvaro usually composes church music and performs at weddings but all that is now cancelled. He feels that music can help quite a lot and didn’t find the lockdown boring. He says, “Inspiration is there everyday whether there is a lockdown or not.”

Goa got to see wonderful English plays because of a certain creative lady called Isabel Vas. NT GoGoaNow catches up with her to find out what she’s been up to these days. Sheryl Gonsalves – NT GoGoaNow “During the lockdown I was alone. Traffic had stopped. Everything was completely silent. The silence brought the birds back into my garden which I enjoyed. For some days I wasn’t able to get groceries but something wonderful happened. Neighbours and other people helped me get food which was very touching,” Isabel reveals. She kept herself occupied with a bit of reading, gardening, and writing. The days were peaceful and relaxing and she used to sit quietly and enjoy the silence. Isabel reveals that she was holding auditions for a new play of hers, but it got cancelled. Having any plays now is a big question mark for her. She has noticed that people like writers, painters, and musicians have become extremely creative during these days. “Coming up with a play is a slow process so I haven’t done anything specific,” says Isabel. She misses her students at Goa University. When asked about the future, Isabel replies: “I’m looking forward to changes in this […]

This time, we had gone to Kerala. Since we had very little time to spend there, we decided to explore something unique. I searched for remote villages near Kochi and found a village named Kumbalangi, just a few kilometres away from Kochi. The name sounded familiar to me, as I knew it from the Malayalam movie ‘Kumbalangi Nights’. The speciality of this village was bioluminescence, fondly known as kavaru in Malayalam. I had experienced the enchanting phenomenon of bioluminescence in the dense forests of the Western Ghats in Goa and the neighbouring regions of Maharashtra and Karnataka during the monsoon season. However, I was very curious to witness bioluminescence in water. Water bioluminescence is a natural phenomenon caused by microplankton that makes the backwaters glow neon blue when disturbed by the movement of water. Initially, we found it a bit difficult to arrange transport to take us there. The people whom we asked about the village wondered why we wanted to go to such a remote place. It was evening, and darkness was slowly approaching, but there was still hope glowing in our hearts. It seemed like a peaceful coastal village, mostly surrounded by churches resting quietly under the soothing […]

A Class 12 student has developed SignFlow, an AI tool that enables two-way communication between sign language and text RAMANDEEP KAUR | NT KURIOCITY In 2023, a brief exchange outside his home left Harsh Marathe with a question he could not shake off. “I met a deaf person trying to communicate using sign language, but no one could understand him, including me,” says the 16-year-old. “He seemed anxious, and I didn’t know how to respond.” Then, a Class 9 student preparing for the Western India Science Fair, he was still searching for a project idea when this incident changed his course. It also made him consider what daily life is like when communication is difficult. He looked for tools to translate between sign language and speech, but found none that worked well for everyday use. He decided to build one and called it SignFlow. The first version, developed in 2023, was a basic HTML-based website. It converted typed text into sign language through pre-recorded videos and used a simple gesture recognition model, trained using Google Teachable Machine, to interpret signs into text. “It was basic, but it showed that the idea could work,” says Marathe, who has been coding since […]

Goa is also called the ‘Sunaparant’, ‘Goa Dourado’, or ‘Golden Goa’ due to the existence of the Peltophorum ferrugenium that covers the ground with golden flowers. The Peltophorum ferrugenium (syn Peltophorum pterocarpum) is variously called as the Copper Pod, or Rusty Shield-bearer tree. It is often mistaken for a Mayflower or Gulmohur, Delonix regia, when not in flower. There are two distinct differences: it does not have large sword-like pods and its new shoots are not green. The word ferrugenium means ‘producing iron’ and is a reference to the new brown shoots that look as if they are rusted iron.  The one or two-seeded shield-shaped pods are a coppery first and then turn rusty brown and, hence, the names.  The trees, and the ground below, are full of golden flowers that are a sight to see till the May. In 2016, the 18th June Road had 100 trees belonging to 23 different species and almost a half of them (49 to be exact) were Copper Pods that made the footpaths look as if they had been paved in gold. A few of these trees were knocked down by the cyclone Taukte. Other trees just disappeared overnight. Copper Pod and Rain […]

A wave-and-whale-tail sculpture built from 600 plastic bottles now doubles as a waste bin at Calangute beach RAMANDEEP KAUR | NT  Goa’s beaches attract visitors for leisure, but they also bear the mark of human impact: visible plastic litter scattered across the sand. At Calangute, the discarded bottles have been assembled into a sculptural installation. The project was created by Socorro-based architect Evanthika Pereira in collaboration with Happy Miles, with students from a private school in Gurugram participating in the hands-on work. The exercise was designed to engage students from Classes 8 to 11 with ocean pollution and the hidden impacts of tourism on coastal areas. “Tourists mostly see the beach, the architecture and places of leisure,” explains Pereira. “The other side of tourism is often overlooked. Plastic being disposed of everywhere is becoming a serious problem in the state.” Happy Miles, which specialises in experiential learning through travel, helped turn the visit into a practical learning experience. “The students didn’t just observe; they helped organise, coordinate, and take part in the work on the beach,” says Pereira. Over a week, about 600 plastic bottles were collected from the beach and nearby restaurants. The sculpture also doubles as a prototype […]