It is amusing as well as disconcerting to see how distorted an image of Goa the popular literature presents to the world. Rajdeep Sardesai had it right when he opined in a recent speech that the public face of Goa is made up by the tourism industry. A popular science book on Physics that I just finished reading dresses up Goa in just such a manner.
Joao Magueijo (I understand it is pronounced "Ma-gay-zhoo") is a cosmologist � a reader in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London � who has a controversial new theory on the early expansion of the universe, and how it can be better explained by a variable of speed of light in vacuum. He is Portuguese by descent. He has announced that he achieved some of his key initial insights into his theory while on a vacation in Goa. He has written a book entitled, "Faster than the Speed of Light � The Story of a Scientific Speculation", describing the development of these ideas. He devotes a whole chapter entitled "Goan Nights", describing his Goan vacation in the summer of 1997 when he experienced some of his Eureka moments. The picture of Goa he presents is well encapsulated in the following excerpts from that chapter: "We chose to escape to Goa, a beautiful part of tropical India that I had always wanted to visit. Goa was formerly a Portuguese colony, but its all-powerful colonial lords were driven out in the early 1960s by the Indian army. Various speed records were beaten during the retreat, in one of the few episodes of Portuguese colonialism I find amusing." "No sooner had the Portuguese left than the Californian hippies arrived, and ever since Goa has had to endure generation after generation of Western fringe lunacy. Semipermanent colonies are now established, and Goa is firmly on the map of nomadic wanderings for all self-respecting peace-and-love followers." "Predictably, Anjuna, where we stayed, was quite a zoo, both in the literal and metaphoric senses. In the former there was an abundance of stray cats, semirabid dogs, cows wandering on the beach, monkeys playfully sitting in bars, goats, pigs, etc. We soon acquired faithful dogs, Goan dogs being desperate to find an owner, mainly to protect themselves from other dogs." "Funnily enough, in sharp contrast to the naked hippies living in treetops and the ecstasy-fueled ravers, among Goans themselves one could sense an undertow of Portuguese 'brandos costumes', or mild manners, a fossilized old-fashioned way of life that has not survived to this day in Portugal itself." "I remember fondly the exquisite pleasure of returning home from his (an expert Fado singer Francisco's) restaurant (Casa Portuguesa), at five in the morning after a tropical storm, singing the Fado at the top of my lungs, thousands of miles away from Bairro Alto (the bohemian district of Lisbon), waking up all the Goan fauna." "Although using one's brain appeared to be discouraged in this peculiar environment, I must say that mine worked better than ever. As I relaxed, a few VSL (variant speed of light) breakthroughs suddenly came to me. Naturally I only jotted them down briefly, waiting until I was back in England to work out the details � Goan nights are not exactly conducive to performing taxing calculations." "Late at night, using God's toilet � the only one available in most Goan bars � I would accidentally look up, through the palms, into the heavens. With little or no electric light to corrupt it, the darkness of the Goan skies only left room for the infinity of stars. I know that observing the universe while pissing may not be the most poetic setting, but the shock was always the strongest, as the full weight of the universe fell into my eyes. From a faraway sound system, I could hear the rave clich� broadcast in an electronic voice: "When you dream there are no rules, anything can happen, people can fly."" Cheers, Santosh
