Goan Culture Club

Costantino Crasto owns a stall outside the Margao Old Market wherein he sells pork and goan sausages. His sausages although good to taste, do not match up with his competition, the diagonally opposite Moraes Pork Shop. But Costantino makes up for it with his customer service, for instance; if you happen to wake up late for shopping on Christmas/Easter eve for your ‘sorpotel’ meat, he is one man who might save you the day and the feast. He will have stocks long after Moraes and Company have exhausted their supplies, shut shop and called it a day. Inheriting the business from his father, his is one of the very few legal businesses in that market, which is fast turning out to be a one stop shop for the crunching illegal number trade.

Costantino is also a tiatrist (Konkani stage artist) and has directed three tiatrs. Whenever he has to leave the stall for his stage performances, he makes sure his sausage clients are served in the best possible manner. He makes small bunches of sausages, so that his deputy can deliver the sausages without counting, thereby saving his customers time. Costantino is involved in two products; the Goan sausage and the Goan tiatr. Both have a mass appeal, but when it comes to choosing between the tiatr and sausage, he favours his sausage business. He prefers to dabble into tiatr in his spare time, because he is more confident about the economics of his market driven sausage price versus the low tiatr ticket price. Stage acting might give him the fame, recognition and if lucky, might sometimes even ring the cash registers at the box office, but he still has to depend on his humble sausage sales to bring home the bacon.

Agreed, he might not be one of the leading directors in the business, but then most in the business actually treat tiatr as a secondary source of income, while income from holding institutional jobs or running small businesses form their primary source of income.

To make sure things never improve financially in this activity, the government has initiated the Tiatr Academy of Goa, a government of Goa undertaking. This is the surest way the government under the guise of promoting Goan culture, gets an opportunity to reign on the people that run this industry to form an exclusive club. It can then start influencing and manipulating content as well as mobilise public opinion in their favour.

Leading tiatrists instead of starting their own academy to take care of the interest of their clan chose the easy way out of involving the government to spend tax-payers money in opening the Tiatr Academy. They probably got carried away with the fancy positions offered to them in their committees.

All is not lost though; and leading tiatrists in this academy should take the initiative to put to test the academy and government intentions. It should immediately start brainstorming remedies to overcome low ticket prices.

There is no point giving awards to the generation past tiatrist when their poor financial condition and leaking roofs still make local headlines. But wealthy tiatrists are not in the government scheme of things, they always need the tiatrist under their thumb.

Tickets should be properly priced and if audiences don’t patronise expensive shows, then probably it is time tiatrist review content, make proper market study and learn a thing or two in promotion and marketing.

 

Above Article appeared on Herald Goa on 2nd December 2011