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Goa slow

Some hasty impressions of India which may well be ignored.

By Farah Zia
farah.mahmood at gmail.com

I have always held against projecting a sight-seeing short
break as a travel piece on these pages. We really mix up
things -- making no distinction between travel, break,
holiday, sight-seeing and ideally want them all rolled into one.

Actually, holiday as it was once understood is something that
people caught in the capitalist rut can't afford anymore (we
need to work to live, don't we?). All we can afford is a
break, a couple of days at the most.

So whenever we get this chance to visit a new place (even if
it's to attend a conference or a workshop) we all carry in
our bags a check list of landmarks of the new place we're
visiting (having googled them already) and there we go,
rushing like mad from one place to another.

The return journey is that of a victor who has accomplished
the deed or nearly so.

          A two-day moot of South Asian editors on Millennium
          Development Goals in Goa was going to be just work
          I thought, and still found the opportunity
          tempting. Editors from South Asia on MDGs in Goa --
          the right mix for me in the same order of priority.

I let things stay simple for me. Honestly I did not get the
time to google the history of Goa or know who Rahul Bose was.

Rahul Bose was supposed to host a dinner for us on day one of
the conference. I told an anxious colleague that it could not
be Bose the actor since India is huge country with at least a
thousand Indians carrying one name.

On the two hour flight from Karachi to Bombay, I got to know
that two of my colleagues were not as hard pressed for time
and knew enough about Goa and Rahul Bose (THE actor I was
told) to compensate for my ignorance.

They were confident for other reasons too. It must have been
their umpteenth time in India while it was only my first. And
although I had secretly comforted myself that Goa was
somewhere outside India (the real India being Dilli and
Kolkata for me), the excitement was immense.

Before leaving, I thought I'd read enough in Pakistan about
India being strangely similar and women riding Vespas to pay
too much attention to. But the Chattrapthi Shivaji
International airport at Mumbai was so damn familiar that I
forgot to notice the similarity.

The separate counter for Pakistanis and the carbon copied
forms too were accepted on the basis of 'reciprocity' (we do
the same to them, so what?) and the formalities were
hurriedly undertaken to catch the bus that was supposed to
take us to the domestic airport for Goa. Only the music
played in the bus came as a reminder that we were in another
country.

And next was the captain of the plane (AirIndia) apologising
profusely for the five minute delay and going on an on. We
could make nothing of the Hindi version of his apology
though. But here was a real surprise.

          Goa airport is located at Dabolim some 30
          kilometres from capital Panjim. But Panjim was not
          where we were heading. It was a resort about 70
          kilometres from the airport, we were told, on the
          opposite side of Panjim and bordering Karnatak. Any
          thoughts of sightseeing that may have raised their
          head in our minds were paid put right there.

But the next three days in Goa offered a perfectly
microcosmic view of the state itself as of India and a
simultaneously insightful and sketchy look into what we now
know as South Asia.

Here are some impressions that stuck -- about Goa and India.
Hasty impressions which may well be ignored. Having read so
much about women riding Vespas, they still surprised me when
I saw them for the first time in Margao, one of the three
major cities of Goa.

Margao falls between the airport and the hotel we were
staying. A young woman carrying a younger brother and an old
mother on the back of the scooter seemed such a simple way to
empower women in cities, without much fuss.

Goa indeed offers a liberating experience to its citizens,
tourists, everyone. The taxi-drivers listen to good music.
The young people are not inclined to move to big cities like
Mumbai from the somnolent towns of the state that stayed as a
Portugal colony for more than five hundred years.

Why are the people at peace with themselves? "Because beer is
cheaper than water!" one of the organisers reasoned. Perhaps
rightly so.

A huge number of churches dot the landscape as you pass
through Margao where majority of the buildings are from
colonial times. There is very little in terms of modern
construction and hence few eyesores.

          As the conference drew to a close in the afternoon
          of the second day, we managed to see the sandy
          beaches, the heavenly hills and forests, we
          experienced the tropical climate and the almost
          horizontal rain as a consequence of an extended
          monsoon. We even saw quite a few back-packers or
          hippies, though the real tourist season begins in
          October and lasts till February.

"More than seven hundred chartered planes come to Goa from
Europe during the 'season', mostly from Russia, United
Kingdom and Scandinavia." The taxi driver was well-informed;
he had to be because Goa's economy rests on tourism. That's
what the commercial activity is all about.

Inside the conference was another world; the participants
trying to reconcile with the reality of discussing poverty in
a five star hotel. While one of the participants brought this
up, the rest of them were ready to thrash out some serious
issues regardless of where they were.

Aruna Roy, the keynote speaker, set the tone of the
conference by highlighting India's key issues, how a few of
them have been resolved and how most others could not,
without even once uttering the word 'MDGs'. The power of the
people once channelised can do wonders. Aruna Roy, the moving
force behind India's Right to Information Act which is now
one year old, did not believe it till she saw it happen with
her own eyes.

Clad in a simple cotton sari, Aruna, 61, was an officer in
Indian Administrative Service for seven years before she
decided to quit. She now lives and works for the rural poor
in a village in Rajasthan.

Rahul Bose in his well-intentioned and well-articulated
speech before the dinner underscored the need to look beyond
the comforts of one's own lives and start helping those
around in the smallest way possible. His association with
social causes made his presence doubly special; his talk was
earnest and inspiring.

And then there was Avinash who left a comfortable job as a
teacher to work in Gujarat at the time of riots and ended up
with Oxfam. Not to forget ....the Goan journalist and the
rapporteur of the conference who, we were told, refused to
stay in the hotel, thinking it too expensive.

So this was India for me. People doing things and effecting
change. An impression so strong that the beauty of Goa fades
in the background. And this is what compelled me to write a
travel piece after a two day visit.

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