SO MUCH TO BUY, BUY, BUY!

It’s a sweet Christmas all around with lots to buy… here’s a pictorial of all the shopping in town Panaji at various venues of Don Bosco Oratory, Caculo Mall and Panjim Community hall.1. Anthony Lobo from Pomburpa knows his plants and pottery ware! 2. Sarees from West Bengal; 3. Eco-friendly choir planters and plates of processed betal nut leaf; 4. Sandip Madkaikar offers a variety of neoro and bilimbli pickle; 5. Sisters Sanika Naik and Reema Sawant are engaged is a variety of sweets, pickles, condiments and ghee; 6. An extravaganza of Christmas decorations and trees to take home 7. Roy had excellent Goan sweets including doce de grao

By Pankajbala R Patel

A round-up of Christmas and New Year time entrepreneurial sales in Panjim … offering much to buy but frenetic buying is absent this year, everybody is buying cautiously despite the temptations.

THE world is truly full of beautiful things to buy, buy, buy and fill up our homes good, bad or purely functional! Alas, this year has been a killer year for many and struggling to earn some income at least; money is in short supply or in cold storage. One cannot reiterate enough what a  horror year of the Wuhan corona virus and consequent pandemic and lockdowns this has been and  by no stretch of imagination at ground level one may say the country is doing very well, thank you.

It is not. Bankruptcy stares most in the face and even in the smallest state of India Goa which enjoys comparatively better parameters of livelihood most entrepreneurs women and men are struggling to get back on is feet with or without government help. Aam aadmi is valiantly doing is best to keep their head above water in the current economic struggle.

Coming to things brightening up this Christmas and New Year it looks like it is and there’re lots of things to buy but ask around and it’s still dismal,  there’s nothing to write home. Purchasing power is low for the many, although those who have money stashed away are splurging. Christmas and New Year shopping is increasingly about various segments of society breaking up into groups of self-help women’s groups or more well placed independent players offering a bonanza of treats over the Liberation celebrations weekend of December 19-20, 2020. Venues ranged from the Caculo Mall lobby space to the spacious Don Bosco oratory hall, to the Panaji Community Hall in capital city Panaji.

Most small entrepreneurs like to team up to sell their goods under one roof and these collective sales usually do well. Also getting sellers together to do collective sales at a venue is getting better with soft, soothing music playing in the background. All venues vied with one another to lure shoppers over the three days— there was much to beguile and seduce the senses with folk flocking in to take a look and buy a little if not a lot.

At the Panjim Community Hall… An overview of lots of fashion attire, footwear, artisanal soaps so fruity one wonders if one may eat them! Also all kinds of decorative artefacts, gorgeous sarees of silk, crepe and sheer cottons, Goan wet masala, lovely Christmassy artificial fix on nails and much more.

People want to celebrate Christmas and New Year at least, albeit in a grim mood, stiff upper lip and all that. The show must go on in life and the young generation must not be disappointed too. Home-based entrepreneurs offered everything from the entire range of Christmas goodies to savor to interior décor fairy lights, synthetic and natural trees to serve as Christmas trees along with the rest of the paraphernalia of baby Jesus cribs, snowflakes, stars and creative landscapes in wood, plastic and even resin. The eco-friendly mingled with the not-so-eco-friendly – most snacks come in gross plastic wraps from plum cakes to dodols to kulkals, and pickles (lots of tendli, karela and carrot-cauliflower, green chili-lemon pickles), useful masala and dried condiments like wadi, papad, various kinds of Goan crunchies by way of several kinds of chakli, chikki, chivda and other farsan temptations. Home made ghee.

Tarang’s flea market put up at the Don Bosco oratory  actually offered a lot of useful and useless buys depending on one’s state of mind! There was Sandip Madkaikar of Loca VocaSandeep all the way from Vasco da Gama with five kinds of nevri or neoro – pittocho, rava, ragi, beetroot and spicy coconut chon, selling at Rs85 per packet of 10 pieces. He also had a lot of bimbli pickle with him (owning a bimbli tree)!

Lots of chakli to be seen too which now comes in various combinations and not all are agreeable, some as hard as rock to break one’s teeth on – be selective! Anita here had the most scrumptious large “urid and chana dal chakli” (Rs100 per 250g, expensive but I found these a best buy compared to other varieties).

There were Ponda-based sisters Sanika Suraj Naik and Reema Sawant offering pure cow’s milk ghee (Rs180 per 200g pack) and something I liked – sweet ginger chakki, useful to put into a boiling pot of tea (that is if you don’t have fresh ginger at hand). The home entrepreneurs are not above hiking their rates if something is in demand! None of the goodies are price-tagged so it is mostly ex tempore pricing. A stall put up by the DRAG mentally challenged children had very decent ladoo and other snacks and folk could be seen preferring to buy here at more economical pricing.

Lots of clothes ranging from the conventional to the bizarre; saris from West Bengal; pottery artifacts; not to forget the plant nurseries outside the oratory. Here an Anthony Lobo of El Olam, all the way from Pomburpa, had an interesting range of plants from exquisite begonia to genuine terracotta cookware – to a query about how to judge good terracotta cookware, he obliged, “It all depends on how long the pots have been fired, mine undergo firing for three days…the good pots will ring like a bell when you tap them!”

Do you know that bricks undergo firing for up to 15 days and more before they’re ready for sale? His cookware was selling from Rs100 to Rs350 and eminently buyable. How do you prepare the pot for cooking? “Well, we put rice kanji in it overnight, wash and use it after that!” One could linger talking to this man. I noticed that even the pricing of plants have climbed up with even humble tulsi and curry leaves selling at Rs50-Rs100 and that too in plastic pouches.

At Caculo Mall…(clockwise from left) Santa Claus poses with beauties young and old, that’s Seema Narwani with all her floral hair combs and bands, pretty wooden cribs to do one’s own Bethlehem tableau of baby Jesus, Khameer Desai with his camphor story

All this and much more. At the Caculo Mall Christmas Shopping Extravaganza powered by AURA I found Santa Claus wandering around posing with children and exuding bonhomie, I said hello to my friend Seema Narwani who has the best collection of these lovely colorful floral hair ornaments/clips/combs which she gets from Singapore. Women love these enduring floral hairpieces.

Elsewhere: The usual Christmas sweets and hampers, cribs, themed masks, jewelry, etcetera. With my tight budget this year I was constantly in a to buy or not to buy mood, generally I get carried away with sympathy but not this year and I’m not joking. Since the whole mall zone was filled with camphor aroma right up to the entrance I had to take an interest at Khameer Desai’s range of little camphor containers to plug in – put a fragrant piece of camphor on the plate  and switch on and soon a lovely camphor scent fills the air most beguilingly.

Camphor is something wonderful as a mosquito repellant and you may put it amongst your clothes for preservation and fragrance and so on and so forth. Women like to use camphor lotion or water to refresh their complexion and it is much used as an astringent lotion in beauty parlors. Most camphor is adulterated with oil but this camphor here Khameer tells me is a very original form of camphor,  it won’t evaporate or burn like the usual commercial camphor we burn during puja rites. Expensive of course, and he has two or three models of his camphor plug in units priced from Rs200 to Rs450 with a small supply of the camphor along with it. I bought one and that night enjoyed sleeping off to camphor scents! A real steal of a buy and I hope it endures although camphor has to be refilled once over (get a refill at Baga Crafts at Mall de Goa).

WELL, folk were buying although not on a frenetic spree. At least I wasn’t. The real piece de resistance sale was going on at the Pop Up Winter Flea Sale at the Backwaters space at the Panjim Community Centre…here there was a lot of more upmarket buying going on, from fashionable attire to footwear to jewelry and Goa’s distinctive wet masala pouches (Shaun and Shaneta Mendes are doing these Easy Curry wet masala pastes which make for tempting buys).

At the refreshments section some high class food was  selling but flies buzzed (backdrop of the contaminated backwaters here) and I was reluctant to spend money buying anything from the GGB  “wholesome meals, salad style” to whatever else. Hey, otherwise there was lots here at this so called funky end market to inspire curiosity — from razzmatazz jewelry to satin hair bands to ornamental finger and toe nails, said the girl here, “I chew my nails so they’re in terrible condition! I find it is easy to fix these nails for an evening out!” Well, the Christmassy ones are very pretty and I was tempted but not tempted enough to invest in something of little use in my humdrum lifestyle. But the satin hair bands were lovely, wish I’d bought some!

So it went as it goes with these sales…it is clear that the well-to-do are doing business to cater to the well-to-do, and clearly there is money around to spend. However, thanks to the long months of pandemic scares and sins of omission and commission, and closedowns, and many fearing to step out of their homes…shopping is more or less restricted. Many like to look at the catalogues put out by the on-line companies Amazon, Clipcard, Myntra, Snapdeal, Flipkart and order whatever appeals and all of which delivered to their doorstep. Doorstep delivery is the name of the game.

With the economic damage far more consequential it is not surprising that everyone is rallying around to earn some money and this is poignantly visible at this year’s Christmas shopping venues in stores or at trumped up sale venues. You buy some, you let go a lot with some or little regret. But don’t forget to remember the real joys of Christmas time as we say goodbye to 2020 and look forward with evergreen hope that 2021 will see the last of the Wuhan virus and we will be breathe the air of freedom anew. May 2021 be better than 2020…less of kalayug and more of satyayug, have a happy Christmas, my friends!  

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