The Creeping Malaise: When Youth Consume Themselves, Meaninglessly
by V. M. de Malar
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The senseless murder of Mandar Surlakar by his own best
friends has been a rude shock. All involved are our children
-- young men who grew up in our famously relaxed, supposedly
peaceful atmosphere. The murderers are not gangsters; they
represent an affluent part of our society.
This tragedy aches so much precisely because
everyone involved is so clearly part of us, the
best of our youth in whom so much is invested. In a
steadily booming Goa, in a dramatically resurgent
India, these kids had the world at their feet. All
gone now, as their lives have been individually and
collectively destroyed.
Mandar has been cremated, and now we will watch helplessly as
the hopes, dreams and potential of his killers also turn to
mere ashes.
It has been a rough few weeks for our gracious Goenkarponn.
There has been ugly jostling on the insider-versus-outsider
fault line.
Just this week, we seen a spate of drownings, two and three
at a time, bright young lives poured down the drain in an
amazingly careless manner. And we've seen the constant
presence of violent crime, of assaults and murders at the
fringes of the real estate and tourism businesses, as profits
and land values have soared past any expectations we might
have had a few years ago.
Mandar Surlakar's murder is surely connected to this boom.
His killers demanded 50 lakhs (five million) rupees from his
father, and killed him when they realized they weren't going
to get it. It's the money culture that had them in its grips,
and it is possible that drugs were involved. Either way, it's
the environment of fast times and fast money that consumed
these young Goans, and one of them paid the ultimate price.
You can't blame the youth exclusively. They are
simply playing out what they see in society around
them. Every Goan knows that dirty business is afoot
on a massive scale in our state, and we all see the
perpetrators get away with everything, including murder.
In our Goa, the "big men" tend to be thugs, kleptocrats,
scamsters, crude wielders of the kind of power that comes
from goons with choppers and contraband weapons. Not only do
they get away with all of it scot-free, we've all seen that
blatantly criminal activity leads directly to great
influence, to an odd kind of popular respect, and to seats in
the state Cabinet. Mandar's killers were nurtured in this
environment, what messages did they absorb from childhood?
* * * * * * * * * *
Other Goanet threads on this topic:
Peer rivalry cause of kidnap and killing? godfrey gonsalves
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2006-August/047102.html
Murdered Vasco boy's close friends are the 'kidnappers and
killers' JoeGoaUk
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2006-August/047117.html
Murder of a DJ ... do we need to wait for a gruesome murder
to know something is going wrong? FN
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2006-August/047149.html
* * * * * * * * * *
After his friend Anuj Joshi was brutally murdered by unknown
assailants, the writer Sudeep Chakravarti diagnosed something
he called "Malaise de Goa." He looked at our raging tourism
economy, at the tidal wave of cash overwhelming our state but
leaving most locals high and dry, and found "the stakes have
become too high."
Chakravarti says "piece-of-the-action is also driving Goa to
the edge" and points the finger at that can of worms that we
all know and recognize, the Mafia-like "web that involves
foreign once-tourists, thugs from the subcontinent, local
land sharks, local law keepers, local lawyers, and local
politicians." He's absolutely right -- we're living on top of
something quite like a malevolent time bomb. It will continue
to tick and claim victims until it is properly defused.
Mandar never made it to his twentieth birthday. His murderers
will see their lives wiped out as surely as their victim. It
is a form of justice done. But that particular cycle of
retribution does nothing for our broken culture.
When will the murderers of our age-old values pay
the price? When will the hopelessly corrupt
officials be brought to reckoning? Will we shake
free of the pestilential scourge of property
developers who have formed such potent nexus with
the shameless politicians?
All of it can happen, but we need to recognize what is
happening and what is at stake if we do not take hold of our
culture right now. We need a change of heart, a collective
conviction that enough is enough, that we can and will change
course for the better. If not, it's clear to see, we'll find
ourselves tormented again and again, as our youth consume
themselves in the terrible, meaningless manner that we were
compelled to witness this week.
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VMdeMalar is a long-time Goanetter, who opted to move from
New York back to Goa a year back, where he focuses on writing
on a wide range of local themes for cyberspace, for the
Mumbai magazine TIME OUT and for the local media.
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