"Difficult to understand how anyone could think and speak in a language that is not his own." That is true. But it is also important to understand concrete situations. For a Catholic from Goa born and brought up in Mumbai, one has to keep in mind different factors: the language at home might be a mixture of Konkani and English; in school, clearly English; on the street, Marathi, which is the local language, and sometimes Hindi, the national language - Marathi if you are fully accepted as local, Hindi to tell you that you are not completely local. In addition, there are the vestiges of the caste system: the upper classes in Goa learned, with the Portuguese, to regard Konkani as the language of the servants, and adopted Portuguese as their language. The lower classes, with little opportunity for education, remained with Konkani.
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