Breathes there the man with soul so dead whose children are alienated from him? When the hurly burly’s done, my daughters seem actually to enjoy time spent with me. Nothing is more fulfilling; nothing so soulful.
And so it was on New Year’s Eve in Goa, we ordered several bottles of champagne while awaiting 2010. There was music and dancing and much merriment. I felt lucky to be me. Those assembled that night were an incestuous mix of family and friends. Above all, it was a raucous lot.
Noise somehow seems to be directly proportional to the fun you are having. And our noise started before even the first glass was poured. If a bunch of stone-cold sober people can stir up the pot, what happens after a couple of bottles of champagne?
Answer: it does not get maudlin or sentimental or nostalgic, only much more fun as people yell and smile and nod at each other to communicate over the loud music, without really hearing what anyone’s saying. They happily pour themselves that extra glass of champagne that teeters between enhancement of reality and oblivion.
So what’s the big deal about this particular midnight? I think it is a generic birthday celebration when we all get older by the calendar year, never mind specific birthdays. It’s not as though human existence can be subsumed by accurate accounting: no, I’ll be 50 only in March; or 65 in September or 21 in July and 40 in April.
On January 1, everyone is a year older, give or take 365 days.
New Year’s Eve is a communitarian birthday celebration and as such egalitarian. Random strangers come up and wish you with a smile in their eyes and good cheer in their heart. And you think to yourself, what a wonderful world! You think about new beginnings, rather than endings; of spring, not fall. The key message is renewal, not decay.
There’s no denying, for many of us, more such celebrations are behind rather than ahead of us. Growing older is a complicated process. At once, you are wiser, more sure of yourself. You realize clearly you will never run a four-minute mile or do a breakdance. The real issue is whether you find value in your life or moan the years that have flown
My wish for New Year’s Eve is we will continue to have fun with family and friends, not just on mankind’s common birthday but on every occasion we can grab.
Sitting on Goa’s northern MorjimBeach one Monsoon morning, the solitary man on the horizon gazed dumbstruck at the turbulence of the waves, crashing ashore in 20-foot walls of water and giant sprays. He thought it was a spectacular Impressionist water color, with a streak of menace that would be difficult for even Claude Monet to capture on canvas.
Entranced, he gaped at the scene: steel grey skies pregnant with black water-laden clouds lit up by jags of lightning; thundering brown water bearing down on the beach with giant whitecaps and a compelling surround-sound roar of thunder and angry thumping water that eclipsed the soaring Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Sometimes called “a memorable page in universal culture,” this masterful last movement celebrates the human spirit and exhorts man to higher achievement. But the Monsoon tableau on display that morning made any achievement of man look and feel shallow. It was an epiphany, a darshana, a terrifying revelation of divinity.
The drama that unfolded before his eyes would not let him be a mere spectator; he was commandeered as a participant. The pounding surf, the ominous thunder and the streaky lightning compelled him to acknowledge the sinister majesty of Nature; sinister because violence was its central core.
For a moment, he thought he’d go into the roiling water. Just then, the rain started pelting down and he stood petrified. The rain disrupted his trance, luckily as it turns out, for to have ventured into the ferocious sea could have been fatal.
Beating viciously on every surface in sight and beyond, the downpour blurred his vision. The incessant sound of the rain and the breakers mixed rhythm and melody like the jazz drummer Max Roach. As the rain came down, he looked around and debated running back to the shelter of his car, decided against it and simply sat there, transfixed.
The man could do no more than to surrender to the storm. Stretching his arms out, he turned his head skyward and let the rain beat down on his face and his body. He seemed to be shouting, not that there was anyone there to hear him. He was the only person on the beach; it was him and the Monsoon, an atavistic one-on-one encounter.
His clothes, his body, his very insides were drenched. But he was like a child, shouting to be heard over the storm. Still the rain kept pouring, and like Credence Clearwater Revival, he wondered if anyone could stop the rain, even God. He felt helpless and yet strangely, deliriously happy. This was sheer abandon: unprecedented, sensual, liberating, joyful, glorious and magnificent. To succumb to the majesty of Nature like he did that morning on MorjimBeach was to assert that the soul is immortal.
***
Portraits
But we have fast-forwarded the story by about 50 years. What was the man doing at MorjimBeach? What circumstances led up to that Monsoon morning in Goa? Why had he been coming to Goa for 27 years? What led him to buy a house there some 10 years ago? Answers to those questions paint a portrait of the life and times of the Goan diaspora in Bombay and elsewhere.
So let’s pause and go back to the 1950s. We are in Bombay, looking at a pre-teen boy standing of an evening in his living room verandah. Let’s call him Marco, as in Marco Polo because over the next 50 years the boy would travel far and wide, literally and metaphorically. For the moment, chin on the railing, Marco is looking through the window of a neighboring apartment. He sees a family at prayer. They were his friends from the neighborhood, kneeling with their parents at the evening rosary.
His friends were Goan Catholics. They could be found in the city’s cosmopolitan, culturally diverse neighborhoods. The middle classes tended to cluster in the western suburbs of Bandra and Santa Cruz and in city neighborhoods like Dhobi Talao and BycullaBridge.
The verandah on which Marco stood was part of a large and airy apartment on the second floor of Court Royal, an apartment building in Christ Church Lane in the BycullaBridge precinct of central Bombay. It was a middle class neighborhood of breath-taking cultural diversity including Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Hindus. A large number of its Catholic residents were Goan, including the family that Marco saw kneeling in prayer that evening. There were a number of Protestants as well, mostly Anglo Indian…and an occasional Hindu family
Named after the school it abutted, Christ Church Lane had the characteristics of cultural diversity balanced by traditional conservatism that Montstuart Elphinstone would have approved. A Scottish statesman, who was appointed governor of Bombay in 1819, Elphinstone was widely respected for his thrust on education. He established the Bombay Education Society that set up schools such as ChristChurch.
(For the record, the Elphinstone Road station on the Western suburban line of Bombay’s commuter train service was named for his nephew, John, who was governor of the province in the 1850s.)
Living in Christ Church Lane through the 1950s, Marco came to believe that India was a culturally diverse, tolerant project, little knowing that outside BycullaBridge, it was racked by caste, ethnic and religious conflict.
The neighborhood was home to Bombay’s aspiring middle class: cosmopolitan, diverse and secure. Growing up there, the only disagreements Marco had with his friends were about Elvis versus Cliff Richard, Ricky Nelson and Pat Boone. Yes, he was a fan of Hindi film music and his family was the only vegetarian in the building but the neighborhood was so culturally diverse that his food habits were accepted as part of the diversity. He was included in the community of kids playing games and fooling around each evening until the street lights came on.
At day’s end, his Goan Catholic friends would go home to be in time for the family prayer. Then they would sit at the dining table and have a convivial evening meal. Marco found it comforting that the family came together every evening to pray and to dine and to talk. Sundays, they dressed in their best and drove in the family car to church and returned to have lunch together.
In the summer vacation, they all set off in a ship from Bombay to spend two months at their home in Goa. On their return, they would regale their friends with tales of the sea journey and talk about singing and dancing on the boat with many others like them. They told stories of their sojourn in Goa: loafing on the beach, splashing in the waves and of guitar-strumming, singsong picnics.
A picture of this wondrous place that was at that time not part of India began to form in Marco’s mind. It got entangled with his impressions of England derived from the novels of Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton (of “William” fame) and countless other schoolboy books: of country lanes, green pastures, bicycles and tea shops.
Christ Church Lane was widely known for its gorgeous girls. Marco and his friends called all of them Diana, after the Paul Anka song, “I’m so young and you’re so old…” They were innocent of sex then; they knew only puppy love and panted after every lovely girl who walked down the lane. It was romance at a distance; they eyed them and generally behaved in an idiotic manner. Forget sex or holding hands or kissing; all they craved for was a smile, an acknowledgment that could keep them going for days.
Embroiled in this vivacious diversity, Marco began to believe that all of India was the same. It was far from the truth. This became apparent in the early 1960s; he had to leave Christ Church Lane because his parents were transferred to the new state of Gujarat that was formed when the old Bombay state was bifurcated. Like a refugee, Marco was forcibly relocated to Ahmedabad, a moffusil town that was the designated capital.
And so it came about that on a warm April evening, Marco stood on a train doorway, teary-eyed and desperately unhappy, waving goodbye to his close friends, bound for an unknown future
Plucked from the crucible of cultural diversity, he struggled to grow up in a milieu of moffusil values and suffocating conformity. His teenage years were turbulent as the reality of the hinterland began to cow him down; the comfortable middle class milieu of Christ Church Lane seemed to recede. It seared his mind, the awakening that the drivers of life in India were prejudice, disruption and division.
***
Landscapes
Last year, I made my first trip to Goa in the Monsoon.
One morning, I took time off to cruise the northern beaches. Ominous dark clouds were gathering low in the sky. As I wandered up and down the coast, I finally settled on Morjim to watch the fury of the sea. Virtually hypnotized by the tableau, my mind floated back to the first time I came to Goa.
My wife and I, along with our infant daughter stayed with her family at their house in north Goa. They introduced me to the place that was just a notion in my head for all the years I had spent with my friends in Christ Church Lane. The experience plunged me headlong into the earthy robustness of Goan life, including food, mindset and scenery.
I still remember vividly my first visit. As we came out of the (still) chaotic Dabholim airport, Goa burst upon us with sweeping vistas of the Arabian Sea and the mighty ZuariRiver as the car wound its way up and down the hilly highway. Since then, I have probably traveled the road at least a hundred times but to this day, the beauty never fails to amaze me
What adds to the visual experience is the promise of time snatched from the world to luxuriate in the serene green of Goa: long drawn out days in which the major decisions you are called on to make include mostly sensual delights: whether to have prawns or fish for a meal; beer or some other aperitif, perhaps even a slug of Goa’s lethal cashew feni, which can stay in your system for days
Goans call the experience sussegad; a state of mind in which each morsel of fish and every sip of beer is an eternity. There is impermanence about sussegad; it is an altered state of consciousness in which time is stretched to make every nanosecond count.
Given my wife’s umbilical bond and my own fascination with the place, we got our own house in Goa. Then we began to see another dimension not always evident to casual visitors. Suddenly, Goa was more than palms and sand; now there were bazaars and repairmen; rambling drives through quaint villages and glimpses of impressive white churches that dot the landscape. The concept of sussegad also changed; from an eternity on shacks on the beach and frolic in the sea, it became an unhurried pace of life in which things must get done without demanding schedules and dictatorial appointment books.
Sometimes we head off to Panjim, the capital, at the mouth ofthe expansive MandoviRiver. Decked up in lights at night and by day resplendent with gorgeously painted buildings, Panjim is unrivaled in its big city feel and its small town ways. It feels like an India that should have been but got lost somewhere in the transition to modernity
To many Goans, this restful capital is the big, bad and stressful place. So in what havens do they live? For one thing, there’s our small village that is less than ten minutes away from the busy National Highway 17 from Bombay to Kerala. Anchored by the white splendor of St Elizabeth Church, it is the capital of quiet.
Nestled between river-riven paddy fields and a picturesque hill, our village does not feature on a local map of Goa. Of an evening, residents gather at the church piazza, which has a bucolic view of the paddy fields and an unnamed river in the distance. There, they while away the eveningwith a snifter or two of feni, watching young people play volleyball in the church compound and talking about things that I would dearly like to know about.
It is an appealing scene. We don’t participate in it but simply in observing it and waving to the people as we drive past the plaza, we feel part of it. In a vicarious way, we feel we belong there. That is the attraction of Goa.
***
Gallery
The reason I was in Goa last Monsoon was to sort out arrangements for my daughter’s wedding later in the fall. Fittingly, the ceremony was held in our village church, a stone’s throw from our house.
We had a traditional Goan Catholic wedding with Goan cuisine, band, dance and cocktails at our house. The event represented my traverse of a full circle from the pre-teen years when I first encountered Goan Catholics in central Bombay’s Byculla Bridge neighborhood and the end of my teen years when I met my wife, also a Goan Catholic to my part Goan daughter’s nuptials last year.
The trip to MorjimBeach was special alone time for me, an opportunity to take stock. Mesmerized by the Monsoon tableau and lost in thought, I could feel the hard rain falling on me. I thought to dash to the car but was drenched. I looked up at the sky in abandon. With the rain in my face, the spectacular jags of lightning in my eyes and the roar of thunder and crashing surf in my ears, I yelled at the top of my voice, “Thank you.”
It’s been nearly two months since we were in this haven of mental comfort. Daytime temperatures are in the 30s Celsius (80s Fahrenheit); at night the mercury drops into the teens Celsius (60s Fahrenheit); the weather is perfect. In the interim, we’ve been part of a hectic social life in Delhi, confronting a grim business scenario and watching the politicians and bureaucrats respond ineptly to the Bombay terror attacks and to the global economic crisis.
Even worse, the major opposition party has betrayed its nationalist platform, choosing to berate rather support the government in its handling of the Bombay crisis; it doesn’t know enough to challenge the government’s response to the economic meltdown. Under the circumstances, even though the government came under fire for its inept response in Bombay, the opposition party was shown up to be an opportunist, seeking to milk any and all situations in the hope of narrow political gain.
The four-year old multiplex, which screened the film, is the best I have seen: a slick glass and chrome building in a shady plaza across from the MandoviRiver promenade in downtown Panjim; surrounded by gems of Portuguese colonial architecture including the MaquinezPalace. What struck me as we arrived at the plaza was the presence of a television crew. “Might they be doing a feature on the excellent architecture and the blend of the modern and traditional aspect of Goa?” I wondered. Moments later a bunch of dyspeptic-looking middle-aged and young men, ignorance writ large on their faces, arrived at the spot and unfurled protest banners identifying themselves as members of a Hindu revivalist group.
Not just me but a whole bunch of others including foreigners asked them what they were protesting. Their spokesman, not looking at me, addressed the white man: “The movie is an insult to our god Rama.” How? Clearly, they had not seen the film; after all, it was just the second commercial screening that day; the Hindi version debuted at 1.30 pm; we had tickets for the first show in English at 4 pm. Anyway, the Hindu revivalists had been told to protest so dutifully, they showed up. “Even if the film offends you and you have the right to protest,” I asked their leader, “do you know the Indian Constitution guarantees the freedom of expression?” He’d never heard of the Constitution. So I gave up on him and walked into the theater.
The film has been nominated for 10 Oscars and that is awesome. It is wrong to crow that this is the first Indian movie to be so hugely recognized. It is not Indian, only its theme is. It is an absorbing film that should at the very least win the Best Editing award. While we were in the auditorium, the lackadaisical Hindu group had been supplanted by more militant Shiv Sena storm troopers, who set about destroying posters and threatening violence unless the screening was stopped. Mercifully, the police showed up to drag them away and all went well that ended well.
Such fringe, Taliban-style attacks are erupting all over the place, most recently in Mangalore where Hindu fundamentalist thugs assaulted men and women enjoying music and dancing at a pub. Such people are encouraged in states where the government is perceived as weak or as a promoter of Hindu fundamentalism. That such lumpen groups feel free to disrupt, destroy and terrorize innocent citizens is further evidence of the utter failure of governance. When governments all across the country acquiesced in the renaming of major cities and urban landmarks under pressure from such groups, we shouldn’t be surprised if such events occur and multiply.
So much for our dose of grim reality! After that experience at the movies, we spent a laidback evening with friends talking about vegetable dyes and fabrics and plants and trees, with a great meal thrown in. By the time we bade farewell to our friends, we had virtually forgotten about the incident. Many thoughtful commentators in Goa and elsewhere have lamented the rise of gated communities that separate the new India from its old timeless regime of poverty and numbing tradition. That’s true; more worrisome is the huge mindset gap. There is much to criticize about the divides of class, caste and religion. We should wake up to the biggest rift of all: the awareness chasm, which divides illiberal and liberal opinion.
Even so, Goa claimed us with its sensuous charms. We spent the next day languorously, sitting on armchairs, reading books and watching television, especially an episode of the BBC’s wondrous series on Mathematics. Somehow in Goa, since the senses are sated, we look to stimulate the mind. Dinner was at a shack on the beach, talking about Obama and the amazing ability of the American political system to throw up leaders with a forward vision and a plan to change things.
And so the days pass in Goa: the mind is rejuvenated and the body sheds accumulated stresses. You sleep soundly and wake up refreshed, looking forward to a breakfast of poi, the wonderful pita-style bread that’s delivered fresh each morning, and fresh fruit like figs. You can almost feel the toxins draining out of the system and the mind refreshed. Every now and then, you spend an afternoon on the beach, communing with the sun and sand, bathing in the gentle swells of the sea. The food is fresh; your taste buds are more alive and you can drift off on a sun bed while reading a pulp novel.
Soon it will be time to return to the storm-tossed world of urban India. But you feel better-equipped to handle it, especially knowing that soon you can come again and be part of the timelessness of this haven.
So here we are in Ucassaim, Goa again. The monsoon is at an end and now there’s bright sunshine; warm humid days, cool starry nights. And I think to myself what a wonderful world. There are high-pitched songbirds in the morning; an irritating rooster with five-o’clock-alarm regularity; peacocks romantically a-braying at the prospect of snakes. The bread guy, the egg man and every other vendor has this little rooty-tooty horn that starts blowing from five in the morning to midday.
Our little village is, as such, a bucolic place. After three days of rain and a day of sunny blue skies, you can sit in the verandah and still hear the water dripping from the trees at night. You get up from your armchair and look up at the million trillion stars in the sky to see if it’s clouded over again and it’s raining. And you realize with some impeccable insight that dripping water is the main event in Goa during the monsoon. Even after two days of sunny skies, despite the star-filled, moonlit nights, the drip-drop of the water from the trees never ceases. It is soothing, almost mesmerizing.
The wonder of this place is that is a feast of vision and sound but also of heavenly aromas of food: the overwhelming smell of feni, the pungent odor of Goa vinegar and the lustful noseful of seafood. Apart from the hedonistic cornucopia that is the very essence of the place, there are other, more mundane aspects: good roads, polite drivers, great bars, good restaurants. It is fun to wander through the towns, villages and beaches during the day and eat a simple dinner at home or find a buzzing place to dine in.
This time, however, the pleasures of Goa were tinged with a black penumbra. It turns out our bucolic little village is full of greedy and envious neighbors. We’ve tried to reach out to them but their world is so different. The amount of money we spend going back and forth from Goa in a year surpasses their annual earnings. If we were white foreigners, nobody would hassle us; if we were rich, we would have people to contain them. Being neither, we face the hostility of neighbors, who are nice to talk to; it is clear they have a hidden agenda. And they operate stealthily through the Panchayat.
In our case, they cannot complain in terms of religion or caste: my wife is a Goan Catholic; I am a Hindu Brahmin. Between Pereira (my wife’s maiden name) and Desai (also a Goan name), we easily blend in, especially because we live the local life. The problems our neighbors are causing us are petty but stressful. One neighbor is a policeman; he had a wicket gate leading into our garden from his yard and enjoyed a free run of our property. We sealed off the gate. Now he is extracting revenge. He has filed a complaint in the panchayat against the boundary wall we are seeking to repair. He even brought in his loutish fellow cops to threaten us. Another neighbor started an ambitious project to build an additional floor but ran out of money; a third has cattle in his living quarters and the family is always at war, using loud voices and sometimes even physical combat.
All these years, we’ve ignored them, valuing the physical allure of the village. We’ve weaved that attraction into a pastoral experience. I was hoping to write poetry like William Blake,; instead I am constrained to write a Marxist tract. Now that we are sprucing up the property for our daughter’s wedding in the next few months, we’ve had people coming out of the woodwork, objecting to walls; this, that and the other. All complaints go to the Panchayat; there are inspections, without any reference to the alleged transgressor.
In the past few weeks, we’ve had all manner of harassment from neighbors. They are of a completely negative frame of mind. One neighbor complained that we had encroached into his property; another complained, and he lives across the street, that the wall would block the breeze in his house. A third simply said we could not do it unless we built ten feet into our property, giving him the land for free.
We come to Goa to get away from it all. We stay at out second home, mind our own business and reach out to the locals. There is, however, such a simmering pot of envy that you can neither touch nor swallow for fear of burns. We have decided to fight it. Never mind religion or caste, the hostility has to do with socioeconomic differences. Though nowhere rich by global or even the new Indian standards, we nevertheless pay our caretaker more than the per capita income of the village…we probably spend more than that on dinner, when we go out.
That is the truth. But I see no reason why they would gang up on us, except because they believe they can wring a few thousand rupees out of us. Apart from the fact that I would not even part with a penny, I am shocked that these people have such a skewed view of the world: the idea you can gang up to extract money from your better-off neighbor.
As my daughter says, “Man, Dad, they picked the wrong guy.” And indeed they did. My wife is from Goa and I am Goan by choice. We have the resources to tie the Panchayat up in litigation for the next 10 years. Our taxes are 122 rupees a year because that’s really what residents can afford. I have no qualms in using my financial clout to fight harassment. On the other hand, despite the pathetic real estate taxes, the village is clean; everyone manages to dispose off their garbage and there are no smelly bins of the type you find in Delhi’s villages. We know because even in the capital we live surrounded by a village that is immensely wealthier and depressingly dirtier.
So there we have it. We live in this bucolic village; we spend more money in a day than the local residents do in a month. But we could become victims of the egregious envy of our neighbors, who are simply hoping to make a buck by slowing our renovation. I told members of the Panchayat, who came to visit us, that we will support the local orphanage (imagine: in this little impoverished community, there is one). But we have no time for envious and greedy neighbors. And we will move heaven and earth to insulate ourselves from the petty machinations of the neighbors. It is class warfare, plain and simple.
Early one Tuesday morning, I found myself sitting in the naval terminal at INS Hansa in Dabholim, Goa. A young officer from the American navy strode to the front of the reception area and began to brief the assembly about the flight we were about to take to the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that was sailing 300 miles west off the Goa coast. The officer, who was also the pilot on board the C2A Greyhound turboprop, said things about safety gear, water-landing and whatnot. He made it sound fairly normal. So we geared up with helmet, goggles and flotation device and walked out to the aircraft.
It was a posh aircraft. No, there were no nubile flight attendants, 18-channel entertainment system or anything of the sort that is generally associated with the word “posh.” It was a no-frills aircraft with not much beyond 14 regulation-issue seats facing backwards and two portholes for windows; no sound-proofing, no second skin, a couple of lights and that’s pretty much it. You had to wear your earphones else you risked deafness. But it was posh, in the sense that passengers faced away from the pilot. “Port Out, Starboard Home,” the British called it, referring to the cabins on the port side of the ship as it sailed to India and those on the starboard side as the ship sailed back to England. The idea was to catch the last and first glimpse of “my own, my native land.” In this instance, we faced the shoreline of India, a comforting factor for a white-knuckle passenger like me confronting what they call an “arrested landing” and saw the back of the Nimitz as we were catapulted into the sky in the take-off back to Goa.
As we took off from Dabholim airport towards the Nimitz, everything seemed normal just like the dozens of flights I have taken out of Goa. In flight, the plane settled into a vibration mode that lulled me to sleep until I heard the pilot through the headphones, saying, “We’re three-quarters of a mile away from the ship.” Awakened, I sluggishly tried to peer out the port-hole, hoping to see the ship. Suddenly, I saw two crew members, who were sitting directly in front, waving their arms frantically. Then there was a roar, the plane’s throttle opened up to full speed, a thud and a few seconds of eternity as the COD (carry onboard delivery) plane came to a screeching halt.
Later, standing on the flight deck, as I saw a series of F-18 fighter jets land, I saw a hook being lowered as the plane came in to land. The hook grabbed one of four cables stretched across the width of the four-and-a-half-acre deck and made what they call an “arrested landing.” I began to understand why I thought the few seconds to it took our plane to go from over 120 miles an hour to a full stop in just 30 yards seemed like an eternity. At that point, it’s between the skill of the pilot and the Maker: split-second timing rather than fancy high technology made the difference between an “arrested landing” that enabled me to have lunch with the commander of the ship and a “crash landing” that might have set me in front of the Maker, worrying about all the stuff I may or may not have done in my life that He might question.
The hours on the ship zipped by and its dimensions—18-storey height, 97000 tons, 1000 feet in length, 4.5 acres landing deck, 5000 sailors, 110 planes—are gargantuan. Pretty soon, I found myself in the posh plane as it taxied to line up on the steam-powered catapult that would launch the plane into the wild blue yonder at 120 miles per hour on a runway that was just 30 yards long. Despite the restraints, the top part of my body bent over involuntarily to where my head touched my knees and then snapped back as the catapult released the plane in a whoosh of nuclear-powered steam. By the time the plane straightened out and set course for shore, I experienced eternity again.
The entire trip to the Nimitz lasted close to six hours. It occurred to me that we had seen the full majesty of American power. What struck me the most about our landing and takeoff was that it is based less on high technology—think about the “arrested landing” and the “catapulted take-off”—than on relentless training and the bravery of the men and women, who do this as part of their daily routine. In the end, I concluded that these brave and well-trained twenty-somethings should try driving on the streets of any Indian city. We do it daily. It is far scarier.
High up on a cliff that overlooks the confluence of the TiracolRiver with the Arabian Sea, five friends sat on a parapet of the Tiracol Fort, stupefied by the tableau on view from Goa’s northernmost outpost. The river defines the border with Maharashtra. As genius naval strategists, the Portuguese occupied this fort in 1746 to complete the battery of defenses they set up at the mouth of all of Goa’s major rivers, especially in the northern part.
They had the southern Malabar Coast covered and with the capture of Tiracol, they had an early-warning vantage point on the KonkanCoast. They need not have bothered because the Maratha and other kingdoms on the West Coast did not have much of a navy. As such they had clear sailing all the way up to Daman, just north of Bombay and Diu, much further north on the coastline of Saurashtra.
The five friends, Gautam and Rita, Yogi (of the Motwane family whose historic public address systems, Chicago Radio, broadcast the nationalist message of Gandhi and other leaders of the freedom movement), Estelle and your Goa-besotted correspondent, sat on the battlement sipping beer. We were not that concerned about Portuguese naval strategy. We just sat transfixed at the Monsoon magic on display. We watched the giant whitecaps of the choppy brown sea attack the shores of the Casuarina-linedQuerimBeach across the river and gaped at the black buildup of storm clouds as they drifted threateningly ashore from the storm-tossed sea.
Then, as the rain came pelting down and clouds of mystery poured confusion on the ground, we watched the beach and the river disappear from sight; a curtain of water descended to obscure our vision.
It was like a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra raised exponentially to the nth degree. Our ears were filled with the wail of the whistling wind, the staccato rhythm of the falling rain, the crash of the waves and the tympani of raindrops falling on our heads; our eyes were blinded with sheets of monstrous rain and jags of lightning in the sky. Behold, I thought to myself, the menacing majesty of Nature!
Our experience at Tiracol was a stunning counterpoint to an afternoon we spent on the island of Divar, just a 15-minute drive and a five-minute ferry ride from Panjim, Goa’s capital. The island is a haven with less than 3000 inhabitants, within eyesight of the capital. For those who have been on Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts in the US, it will appear familiar, if poorer.
It is a huge island with mangroves and swamps and lush paddy fields. The only link it has to the mainland and therefore to the world is a ferry that operates all day until midnight. With impressive villas and pretty cottages, the island is a dream. You can walk or bicycle around the place with no care for traffic.
The jewel in Divar’s crown is the hilltop church, which is being restored to its pristine grandeur and offers from its balconies and its foreground, sweeping views of the MandoviRiver and the villages that line its banks and the hills in the distance.
The story goes that the church once had a bell donated by the master of a sinking ship that sailed up the Mandovi and made it to Divar. He survived and in thanksgiving presented his ship’s bell to the island's church. The bell sadly was too loud and shattered the windows of the church and nearby houses. So it was moved to the Se Cathedral in Old Goa, across from the famous Bom Jesus Church that houses the remains of St Francis Xavier.
As we wandered the island, we came upon the Devaaya Resort that occupies nearly five acres on its northeastern tip. We thought we might stop there to have a drink and refresh ourselves but were refused entry. When we asked why, no explanation was forthcoming. This led us to conclude it was a shady place built by outsiders in league with Goa’s famously corrupt politicians.
No wonder that Goans are up in arms against outsiders and their development projects in their haven. Clearly, the developers of this resort had the clout to override any objections the local people of Divar may have had. Its secretive exclusivity is a blot on the bucolic island. Many questions need to be asked about the place.
Aside of that glitch, our sojourn in Goa was hugely satisfying. At Cavala, a resort on BagaBeach, we rocked to music of the 1960s and 1970s. They serve superb food and the two nights we were there, it was standing room only. In the midst of a thunderous monsoon, Cavala had more people than most restaurants anywhere in India. And they were local as well as from Bombay, Delhi and foreign shores. The band played the Beatles, The Stones, Clapton, Jethro Tull, Chuck Berry and on and on. We thought we were in heaven.
So I land in Goa on a wet Monday afternoon. The landscape is lush with the soothing green of paddy fields, the mysterious green of bushes and undergrowth and the dark, foreboding green canopies formed by trees. I make a beeline to the home of Aasif and Gita in Benaulim, a 30-minute drive south of Dabholim airport. Both have been our friends as far back as we can remember. The warmth is a given but Gita knows about my fondness for this Gujarati specialty called ‘dal dhokli.’ We eat Gujarati food every now and then in Delhi but never, for some reason, this wonderful concoction.
In Goa, as we wolf down fish and all manner of creepy crawlies, Gita’s house is like a port in a storm. She serves the tastiest meat and fish dishes including fresh Bombay Duck, flaky and hugely satisfying. Whenever I’m there though, she adds to her table the above-mentioned dish, much to my delight.
‘Dal dhokli’ is pasta served in a lentil sauce. You put a dollop of ghee on it and the world is at your feet. It is one of the few bland dishes in the repertoire of Gujarati cuisine. As a child, I can remember eating it in my grandmother’s house in a steel thali that was raised on one side by a burning coal. This was ostensibly to keep the contents hot. Some spice it up with ‘methi masala’ that is used to make the famous Gujarati ‘methia keri’ (spicy mango) pickle. I never find the need to do that because the bland dal and pasta are good enough for me.
When my friend Vir Sanghvi wrote about Gujarati food in his excellent “Rude Food” feature in Brunch, the Sunday magazine of The Hindustan Times, he either had never eaten ‘dal dhokli’ before (knowing Vir, I doubt that) or ignored it; most likely, he just forgot about this unique dish. It is unique because Gujarati cuisine makes a fetish about sugar and spice. To be sure, there is a sprinkle of sugar in the dal; never mind that, ‘dal dhokli’ does not even have the traditional garnish of cilantro, called ‘kothmir,’ a green sprig that is superior to parsley or mint. This dish is the closest Gujarati food comes to Western cuisine.
I can see eyes rolling at that sentence. “Aha! You poor sod with a colonized mind! You like everything Western, even their food,” a critic might say. Well, actually Western food is great. But I liked ‘dal dhokli’ even as a child, long before I ate my first morsel of Western food. Growing up in a Gujarati household, I drew sustenance from the legions of sweet and spicy dishes that are paraded on every menu. 'Dal dhokli' was the only bland legionnaire in the march past on my table every day. Like the pauses of silence in a great drum solo, the dish is a subtle counterpoint to the Gujarati taste for spicy food, with a little sugar or jaggery added for good measure. Aimed at your heart, kidney, stomach…we have all the shock and awe ingredients in our recipes to, well, shock and awe you. ‘Dal dhokli’ is the respite, a pause from the recurring assault of hot, sweet and sour.
Oh, so now people from the hinterland are shaking their heads. “Our menu too features spices and we reserve sugar for our desserts," a friend might say. Well, of course it does. But you poor dears, your use of spices is just too recent to compare with those of us who hail from coastal India. We facilitated the global trade in spices when you were still eating roots, berries and dairy products with a side order of grilled chicken and mutton.We were global spice traders and the foreigners we dealt with brought with them a cornucopia of foods from the New World such as potatoes, tomatoes and chili peppers. The foreigners you dealt with came bearing swords of conquest and spears of subjugation.
What can I say? Your garam masala and your sauces are like McDonald’s fast food: just throw stuff together. It’s like a store-bought mango pickle compared to my grandmother’s offering: a labor of love and expertise undertaken annually in the summer, the making of ‘methia keri.’ The right amount of methi mixed with the powder of red chili peppers dried in the sun and ground, sometimes to accompaniment of tuneless singing; with intuitive amounts of haldi (turmeric) and hing (asafetida). The composite powder is stuffed into specially picked green mangoes, cut on the quarters and then steeped in oil. To eat the first flush of the pickle, when the mango is still a bit green is to taste nature after it has been to culinary finishing school.
Coming back to ‘dal dhokli,’ its very blandness adds variety to Gujarati cuisine. It is a distant relative of Rajasthani ‘dal baati’ except that ‘baati,’ the flour component, ain’t exactly ‘dhokli.’ It is a dumpling where ‘dhokli’ is pasta. They too add ghee, lots more of it. It is very tasty but the quality we seek is being ethereal. Forced to choose between the two, I would unhesitatingly plump for the Gujarati dish. And no, that’s not a provincial statement…it is an honest choice.
So here I am back in Goa, the land of spices and New World produce. Between the various curries and the chili fries, meat, fowl and fish, I get my fill. The crispy bite of batter fried calamari, the sensuous swallow of hot and sour shrimp curry mixed into coarse red rice and the sumptuous crunch of rava fried fish are enough to make humble table wines taste good. I am suffused with the exciting taste of Goan food and sated by excellent desserts that include jaggery and coconut stuffed pancakes, seductive coconut cakes and honest and upright custard. I can't get enough of the feast. Nevertheless, a couple of bowls of ‘dal dhokli’ in Benaulim add to the enjoyment of fish curry, chicken caffreal, beef chili fry, fried shrimp, calamari, mussels and teesriyos. To my mind, Gita's ‘dal dhokli’ is an added and growing attraction of this lush green enclave on the west coast that serves for us as an escape from the uncivil catastrophe that the rest of India has become.
It is “off-season” in India’s only civilized state. Late diners, prowling the strip between Calangute and Baga, find a haven in Cavala, a hostelry that has a great bar and a nice outdoor restaurant. And so it was that we found ourselves ordering dinner late one evening. As we waited to be served the food, we ordered some beer and various cocktails.
One gulp down the hatch, I nearly choked as the drink went down the wrong tube. That was because I saw a barefooted white guy walk through the restaurant into the bar, wearing only a ponytail and a saffron loincloth. Mercifully, he didn’t stay there for more than two minutes but it was long enough for me to be offended
Goa is famous for its tolerance but blue-collar tourists and just plain white trash types are stretching it to the limit. In the end, they spend less than tourists from other parts of India, who are equally obnoxious in that they believe and behave that Goa is all about unrestricted and inexpensive alcohol consumption. They drink themselves silly and venture out into the sea, unable to swim, to become the latest statistics in drowning deaths. Both the white trash and the Indian yobs detract from the wonder of this place: its gorgeous landscape; its fresh seafood and its charming lifestyle that is unrivaled anywhere on the Indian subcontinent.
Whether you stay in a five-star hotel by the beach or especially if you live in a seductive little, off-the-map village like we do, the living is easy. Nowhere in India can you find the blend of European charm and desi comfort. Where in the world can you find a place today that is simply shuts down between 1 pm and 4 pm: siesta!
In the circumstances, it is easy to be what Bombay call bindaas. Why get exercised about loincloth-wearing white trash types or beer guzzling desi morons? For one thing, both behaviors are obnoxious. On the other hand, many people like us have made Goa into our haven, away from the ugly chaos of modern India. If we must put up this, we may as well live in Bihar or Thailand.
Our retreat is threatened by white trash and desi jerks. The locals in Goa are too busy to care; they are either applying for visas to Dubai, Canada and Australia or selling heritage properties to developers. An hour’s drive around the place shows up the ugly condominiums and resorts that are springing up like topsy all over Goa; plus there are these little boutique developers who buy properties for a song, develop it and sell them at egregious profits. Indeed there’s one like that in our village that a Delhi-based boutique developer bought for 16 lakh five years ago and flogged it for 80 a few weeks ago; you can be sure no local bought it.
Such stories spread like wildfire in the small gossipy community that is a Goan village and soon, every gent with a broken down old shack is looking for 30 or 40 lakh. Where all this will end is difficult to say but the state government, in a ham-handed way, is looking to curb foreigners from buying property in the state. It is an easy populist posture but the real threat comes from developers like the Tatas, Rahejas and various other national developers, who are offering to make Goa into a place that could resemble Gurgaon near Delhi or the hideous Hiranandani township in Powai, Bombay: as ugly as sin and as crass as Disneyland.
On the other hand, Goa is full of self-righteous NGOs set up by has-been journalists and retired advertising agency types. They are against all development and would rather Goa retain its traditional ways. Their misbegotten idealism has condemned the wondrous place to be a jobless economy; net exporter of locals to Bombay, the Gulf States, Australia and Canada. They fight to retain the old feudal ways and oppose all development of any kind; their idealism is only matched by their serious wrong-headedness.
As I prepare to head back into the rubble-strewn, loud and garish world of modern India, I take comfort in the fact that I will come back here again soon to this constellation of different worlds: a retreat; a home to fly away from; a loud vacation spot; a milk-cow for political plunderers; a virgin land for unscrupulous real estate developers; a place to vent self-righteous NGO indignation. Sometimes these orbits cross as they did for me that evening on Baga beach. The results are often distressing.
On a recent flight from Goa to Delhi, I was seated across the aisle from three loutish young men. Clearly newly rich, they bristled with flashy phones and watches. They did not turn off their cell phones even after the stewardess made an announcement; instead, they went right ahead playing with their toys. I asked them to switch the phones off. They stared at me insolently and went into a huddle from which emerged crude sounds that I finally understood to be mocking laughter.
This is the newly emergent middle class that an open India has thrown up: crass, belligerent and reckless. It is the polar opposite of the privileged classes that presided over closed India: snobbish, full of intrigue and cautious. There’s not much to choose between the two. The new one is vile; the other was servile. While I have been a champion of the emergent middle class, I guess my view was colored by my utter disdain for the privilegentsia of Fabian socialist India. The new middle class is just as hideous as the privilegentsia. I call them the Vulgarians.
The privilegentsia was bred on elitism: right connections, right schools, Oxford and Cambridge. The vulgarian instinct is to push and shove; and when push comes to shove, to buy their way out. On the other hand, while mouthing homilies about the rule of law, members of the privilegentsia held themselves above the law. They never waited their turn for anything and without the slightest bit of embarrassment bent rules, flouted regulations and scorned the law. The emergent class of vulgarians makes no such pretence: they seem to believe everything has a price: schools, colleges, hospitals, and more worryingly: bureaucrats, policemen and judges.
During the privilegentsia raj, India had to reckon with parasitic elites, who dominated state coffers, extorted usurious taxes and provided no public goods in return. Under their dispensation, ordinary citizens were cruelly ignored: no power, no water, no public transport, no roads, no airports, no telephones, no jobs, no primary education, no housing, no public health care and no sanitation.
The minuscule middle class was virtually targeted by privilegentsia policies and in many cases, driven into exile in the United States, Canada and Britain. Those who couldn’t emigrate saw conditions decline rapidly: famines, civil disturbances, war, scarcity, suspension of civil rights under the Emergency proclamation in 1975 and finally total bankruptcy, which the forced the government to fly out its gold reserves in secret and mortgage them to the Bank of England.
Forced to open up the shackled economy, the government scrapped industrial licensing and various other controls. In the process, it unleashed animal forces that transformed India. We went from being pitied as a “basket case” to being admired as an emerging world power with a dynamic economy. With GDP growth of nine percent and more for over the past five years, millions were lifted from poverty. From being an apostrophe in the demographic profile, the middle class burgeoned and became one of the world’s sought after market segments. Global business rushed in to cater to their needs and desires; local businesses shaped up to provide quality goods and responsive services.
Sadly, the flawed education system inhibited the transformation; it achieved less than what it should have. Under the privilegentsia raj, primary education was neglected and higher education became a screening process to weed out “people like them.” Thus, the ordained ones went on to Oxford and Cambridge to return to appointed positions in the privilegentsia. The others, who had no connections in the elite segment, either went abroad to seek their fortunes or stayed behind in an irrelevant higher education system to become rabble for political parties.
On the other hand, with the establishment of the IITs and IIMs, it produced engineers and managers whose skills were far too advanced to be accommodated in the makeshift “Ambassador Car” economy. As such these subsidized elite institutions became feeders to the global economy. All the Indian success stories in global business that are trumpeted in the pink papers are outcomes of the privilegentsia’s misbegotten priorities.
With the rise of the vulgarians, education has become a commodity; something you must have to get a job. All manner of dubious institutions have sprung up to cater to these needs. With the unprecedented growth of the economy, the need for talent has become so acute that just anyone with a degree or even a modicum of education can get a job. The three louts sitting across the aisle from on that flight from Goa to Delhi were clearly among those. They probably had some education and were snapped up by some company and enrolled in an internal training program. They were like trained circus performers.
We have three types of “education.” The first was the classic Oxbridge type where it didn’t matter because you came back to an appointed place in the elite establishment. The other was a technical sort of training where you had no place in India but found a perch in multinational corporations or universities or other institutes of higher learning in the West. Now you have the third variety: of trained personnel focused on specific cog-in-the-wheel jobs.
Whatever happened to liberal values and civil norms as crucial objectives of education? Their lack is India’s Achilles heel.
