Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant inaugurated the 8th edition of Aqua Goa Mega Fish Festival 2025, organised by Directorate of Fisheries, at the SAG open field ground at Campal, Panaji on January 10. CM also visited the Aquarium Gallery at the festival. Fisheries Minister Nilkant Halarnkar, MLAs Delilah Lobo, Ulhas Tuenkar, Rodolfo Fernandes, Krishna Daji Salkar, actress Mrunmayee Deshpande, Director of Fisheries Yashaswini B, IAS & others were also present. The festival was open to the general public from 10am to 10pm and closed on evening of January 12.

HONESTLY, must we eat everything fried – pan shallow fried or deep fried! Fried in some way or another and that too fried in questionable oils, over and over again in recycled industrial oils of which there are many in our increasingly growing killer marketplace. This is to say as always I got tempted to visit the by now annual Aqua Goa Mega Fish Festival (organized by the government of Goa’s Fisheries Department), this year too at the SAG football ground all done up with tented interior and exterior décor…to give the illusion of an underwater aquarium. Be enchanted by the shoals of big, not so big and tiniest of fish and little fishes in their bejeweled beauty in the aquarium gallaries set up on the grounds.
Bus loads of children were doing the rounds with their teachers and entire families with children in tow were all around. The children were all hyped up and begging their parents to buy them some of the ornamental fish to take home. Oh la la la…you know how persuasive children can be and indulgent parents buy them portable aquariums or bags full of itsy bitsy fishes from the perennially popular goldfish, or guppies, or catfish and even shark. One has to take advice on which groups of fish are compatible and which are not!
I’m not into aquariums but quite a few places I know invest in having whole walls of them installed with a magnificent collection of fish swimming in them and they make such a pretty picture to muse over in a bakery or restaurant or even somebody’s home, it’s said watching a happy lot of fish in an aquarium brings down blood pressure. Of course, disciplined feeding and cleaning up of the aquarium is required and it’s hard work, unless you have staff assigned to do it for you.
I mean these are all captive ornamental fish, pet fish and some special expensive breeds too and I hear some fish on whom kindness is showered by their owner, respond in kind in a myriad ways. I had a friend who wept for days after her pet fish, scared of a prowling cat one afternoon, leapt out of the aquarium and landed hopelessly on the carpet of her living room…no one was at home. By the time the family got home their pet was literally gasping for life. The friend’s hubby insisted their fish stayed alive just to die in his hands! Well, there were no more fish in aquariums after that in that home much to the childrens’ disgust.
BUT to stay with last week’s Aqua Goa Mega Fish Festival 2025, this was the 8th edition, last day when I dropped by the queues in the evening were even longer. The tents where the ornamental aquarium galleries were installed were the main attraction…and there were children getting joy rides in boats swirling in inflatable pools, and elsewhere was fishy food to buy like dry fish, prawns, etcetera.
There was the usual entertainment of staged music and children’s playing a lead role in all the sing-songs going on, etcetera. Altogether an enchanting presentation of what life is like under water where our much loved primary sea food comes from; there were lots of appropriate underworld décor around to serve as photo platforms for selfies and making memories.
A GOAN friend said they were serving fresh cooked fish but I didn’t find the stall except one right near the stage where a mobile van was turning out the Garde fish offerings and I relished the fish fingers, but everything was deep fried and served up with tomato ketch-up (Rs150 plus, plus dishes…prawns also, shrimp, crabsticks, etc)…utterly dissatisfying, though the stalls offered chicken burgers, the usual chaat item numbers, these interesting potato spirals and loads of potato French fries tossed in peri peri and/or decorated with gooey cheese. Lots of expensive colorful cocktails and mocktails, none appealed to me (these days I only look for interesting fresh fruit infusion water).

There was a competition for women to do fish recipes and I couldn’t take my eyes of the Carribean-style fish and other dishes, but this was a mere photo op with none of the dishes later thrown open for visitors to taste, in fact the public was kept out. It seemed to me a most mismanaged event. What’s the point of foodie competitions if only a selected few get to taste the winning or even the non-winning recipes presented?
Sorry, foodwise, this year’s Aqua festival was a big disappointment. No fish balls, no Manchurian fish, no laksa (Malaysian tangy fish soup), no sushi, nothing remotely like oven-baked red snapper with Greek or Russian or coleslaw salad for love or for money. Sorry, there was nothing really worth taking an interest in for money or love. There are so many ways to do fish apart from just fryums! Only the Bhingi’s stall was worth a dekho but it was doing only heavy duty spiced up seafood dishes for dinner after the sun had long since set.
So that was that. Goa State Biodiversity Board’s Govan produce was there of tender jackfruit pickle, jackfruit pulp, jackfruit dehydrated bulbs, jackfruit chips, jackfruit “saatya” and there was kokum juice “aagal”, dried kokum rind “sola” and kokum squash, also wooden cold pressed coconut oil, sorted tamarind, banana chips, nutmeg candy and nutmeg pickle, the exquisite fine sweet puri of fenori…lemon pickle, lemon squash, green chilly lime pickle, awla candy/supari/squash/pickle/brined awla (awla being Indian gooseberry and sometimes spelt “aonla,” a wintertime favorite of north India, especially Gujarat…said to be the nourishing ambrosia fruit of India. Govan’s roster of products is quite large now and keeps growing.
I’M told the KSR Global Aquarium folk are all set to promote aquarium adventures in a big way: say do tunnel aquariums, biggest in India; also indoor scuba diving for the first time, and river cross walks, river cross adventure bridges, also “fish feeding, go karting, skyline, skycycle, rock climbing, race track, ATV ride, aqua roller, fish spa, aqua therapy, toy train for kids” and so on. Sounds very good to me, I might even contemplate going down a water roller coaster and landing into an aquarium…
Honey, you really want to see an open-air natural aquarium go to the country’s only Marine National Park-Pirotan near Jamnagar in Gujarat. Many years ago I’d gone with a group of trekkers and it was an unforgettable experience wading into the warm waters of the morning sea waters with the tide coming in – yes, it was like wading into a grand open air aquarium with such enchanting sea creatures caressing their way through one’s feet! Unforgettable. There was a camp fire later and we slept off on the beach sands under the twinkling stars of the night sky and woke up shivering even while tucked in sleeping bags… to this unforgettable flowering of a dawn sky! We had the most charming guide called Sundarlal Bahuguna and I still recall him as he told us, we must get back to the beach before the tide went out “or we will be stranded on some island in the distant Arabian sea!
I wonder how the country’s only marine wildlife park is doing today, is it still there or have the industrial shipbuilding facilities around in the area killed off the last of the marine corals and along with them the gorgeous paradise of underwater life?
THINKING of all this I decided to say goodbye to the Aqua Mega Fish Festival and noticed this gorgeous banyan tree on the grounds, but with piles of construction material piled at its base. So much for love of one of the classical trees of India or even Goa! It’s a most sad looking grandparent of a tree and I hate the hypocrisy with which we perceive trees. Will the CCP please treat trees with respect and not think of them as places to dump construction and other odd rubble or garbage, or even burn garbage beneath trees?
AND finally, all of this reminds that most of us are constantly being reminded to eat fish but fish food has become too pricy with even a thin rava fried chonak going for Rs300! There’re so many ways of doing fish but it’s the same old rava fried and nobody knows how to do a fresh caldin fish curry anymore…in any case I find eating out a most miserable affair nowadays with food over spiced with mirch masala, over salted or stir fried or deep fried to death. Not worth living for.
Except that we are constantly being advised to eat more fish and especially the omega-3 fatty acids rich fish…which is said to bring down blood pressure and is considered as heart food. Fish is a good source of protein with tuna rated as the best protein powerhouse. Pan seared steaks to sushi…there is shellfish too but I don’t much care for that. A 100g cooked serving of most types of fish and shell fish offers approximately 18 to 20 g of protein, or about a third of the average daily recommended protein intake.
Of course fish is considered healthier food to chicken, chicken, chicken fattened with hormone injections… but chicken, fish or beef, all offer about 25 grams of protein per 100g. You know protein is important for building muscle. The meats are also rich in iron and vitamin B12. Seafood’s Omega-3 reduces heart disease and inflammation and beef has a little more iron, zinc, and vitamin B12 than chicken and fish. Eat more fish from clean waters though…nowadays it’s a story of dirty water, dirty food, dirty air!