>From Goa - two sides of a tragedy reveals India's inner strength [image: Print] <http://www.netribution.co.uk/#> [image: E-mail] <http://www.netribution.co.uk/#> Contributed by Nicol Wistreich<http://www.netribution.co.uk/component/option,com_comprofiler/task,userProfile/user,63/> Tuesday, 11 March 2008
"The mother has challenged the Anjuna polica head on and got the backing of the Goan state minister - a remarkable achievement" The Brit, up to his eyes in Ketamine, was eager to tell me how Scarlet Keeling was dressing so provacatively that night she was as good as responsible. BBC News informs me that the mother of Scarlett Eden Keeling - who was horribly murdered in the neighbouring beach to here on Feb 18th - - has five children and had left her alone while she went off travelling with her boyfriend. The DailyMail.co.uk says in fact she is a mother of nine children and lives in a caravan park. I am sure the rest of the press have since said far worse. The truth is that, whoever she is, the mother has challenged the Anjuna polica head on and got the backing of the Goan state minister - a remarkable achievement in the circumstances. What is curious tho, is that in the three weeks this tragic case has been ongoing here in Goa, with press coverage growing day by day, I have heard none of this insensitive talk. The local English language dailies have not mentioned any negative backstory. In fact they have supported the mother every step of the way - only today, following these new reports, have the authorities blamed the mother for leaving the daughter alone<http://www.timesnow.tv/Newsdtls.aspx?NewsID=6401>with the man currently charged with the attack. Consider the reverse situatoin, an Indian mother, from a caravan park / slum, arrives in the UK with her five children, and leaves her 15 year old girl in a trashy seaside town with a drug dealer in his late 20s. The worst happens but the police, not wanting to damage tourism, say it was drowning. The mother complains, calling the police corrupt. Would she get so easy a ride in the British press, and would the local MP monitor the police case? She may already have been dismissed as irresponsible and sent home. It's interesting for it seems to illustrate a difference in the British and Indian mindset. For the Indian journalists, who use phrases like 'horrendous' in objective articles to describe what has gone on, there is a tragedy here, and the mother needs to suffer no more. For the British press - even the BBC perhaps - scandal and sensation boosts readership, which is enough to justify increasing the suffering of the mother a little. I'm sure she is plagued by the press and rude questions - like the mothers of some school friends of mine after they died in a tragic car crash 10 years ago. The Daily Mail published my friend's school photo on the front page the next day with the catchy line 'this is the girl who drove the car of death'. And all the families were doorstopped and hounded by journalists within hours of the event, all claiming they are 'just doing their job', and 'serving the public interest' like SS captains. So I don't go to Anjuna to sniff around. Veejay, a shopkeeper here on a neighouring beach, tells me she was a nice girl, with a piercing in her lip. I hear that the police often cover up tourist murders and it chimes with what appears to be an Indian sensibility of not wanting to make too much noise about 'bad karma'. There are enough tourists here acting carelessly - especially the British, Israelis and Russians - to understand the tension between tourists and locals, especially when considering our wealth (built in part on their labour) against theirs'. Goa is a curious place. The Lonely Planet describes Arunbul, where I stay, as the last refuge of the hippes after Carnaby Street, San Francisco and the rest came to a commercial end. A Banayan tree attracts tourists seeking to smoke chillum and sit in the forrest with holy (and not so holy) 'babas' - wise elders. John Lennon also sat there and wrote songs, supposedly - people have done for thousands of years, they claim. People come and work through their personal drama and issues. Things move forard. The beach is a tip, and everywhere is the trash left behind by the visitors. Rumour has it that the Russian mafia are tightening their grip and will open big hotels and casinos. An American tells me he is working to bring in drugs and prostitutes. But others say the place is slowing down - a recent ban on music after 10pm has killed off the famous trance scene, pushing parties underground and into the jungle. But the drugs remain. Not just the charras (hash) which people smoke anywhere, but all sorts. Ketamine and morphine can be bought over the counter. LSD, MDMA, cocaine, Mescalin and mushrooms are all availble easily. I found a used syringe in the street. Many people walk around bare foot. It's a messy mix. "we are custodians of a miracle. For millions of miles in all directions there is nothing, nowhere like this." A week after Scarlet was killed a British tourist was found dead in his hut in nearby Assvem - a beach filled with British holidays makers - like an Eastenders summer omnibus. I ask the Ketamined Brit if it could be linked. No, he says, junkies come here to die. People are often found dead in their hut from an overdose. Sometimes they fall out with the locals - one Brit won 70,000 rupees in gambling, and when asked to give half his winnings to the Indians he had played against (for whom the 70,000 is at least a years wages), refused and apparently started a fight. He fell asleep on the beach drunk, and was found dead in the sea the next day, heavily beaten. The police said he drowned. The week after I arrived, a Russian, high on LSD, smashed up a stone crucifix on a plateau. Once word got out to the locals a mob came and beat him within an inch of his life. It is understandable that the police would rather people did not hear about this. But it is far worse to think that the police do not care about stopping it from happening. I visited the Banyan tree, staying in the forrest almost two weeks, and after one of the drunk men there, a Catholic Indian who has recently taken charge, claiming to be a baba and working his way through the women tourists, started physically harrassing a Japenese visitor and her boyfriend, I intervened and asked him to stop. He punched me in the throat. I left, and was unsure for a while if the police would in fact take his side over mine. The locals were apprehensive towards me - 'might is right' perhaps a consequence of poverty and ineffective police. In the end I left it. But all of this could hide the real story, a miricalous story I think, of a country where you can leave your wallet on the beach while you swim and find it there still hours later. Lose your posessions, ask around, not blaming anyone but yourself, and find them again... Karmeconomics Imagine a society based not on the pound or dollar. Where these names related only to a piece of paper you used sometimes to exchange for goods and services. But where the most powerful principle is karma - doing good work. It is second nature to us - the idea that what goes around comes around - it was Newton after all who stated for every action will be an equal and opposite reaction - yet is practised with precision in India, while in the west it's barely remembered, and mostly incompatible with everyday life. But if we say that our highest goal is to be happy, and if we know that money will buy us neither love nor hapiness - that in truth the highest levels of depression are in the richest nations, then money takes on a much less significant role. Good work is key. And this includes the work you do to earn money, and the energy you manifest with those around you. If you keep creating good vibrations more come back to you. It's as if to become one with the ultimate, you serve everything, because the ultimate (god, tao, divine, spirit, pi, whatever) serves everything. And the more I look at this system, which respects nature - in fact starts with respect for nature, and the feminine as much as the masculine, the more it seems that India is years ahead of us. Not in terms of technology or infrastructure or inequality or so forth. But in wisdom. Our financial system is built not on karma, but on debt and creating a sense of individual inadequacy, to facilitate increased consumption. And this constant demand for us to always be consuming is not because the big business bosses want to work overtime or are particularly evil. It's that our financial system is so heavily built on debt, that if the economy does not constantly expand, we will be unable to keep up interest payments on the debt of the money we spend and the economy would crash. Paul Grignon's 47 minute animated film Money as Debt - is very illuminating on the subject (and more than a little scary). Which is not to say the market is defunct. Quite the reverse. There's something really strange about letting go of possessions in india, living native in the forrest with monkeys and snakes and spiders, and returning to the market being able to buy cheese, fresh fruit and veg, goods from around the world, beautiful clothes and so on - and for next to nothing, normally. Even credit makes sense when it's issued at source. Sometimes you have lots of money, you pay your bills. Other times you don't and it's a tight few days or week, so the shopkeeper or restaurant or whereever, waits until you have money. But there's no interest, no banks, nop beurocracy - just human contact and trust. It seems that what each of us really wants - hapiness, health and wellbeing - not to mention lots of free time and being close to our friends and family, and a job we believe in and enjoy, is actually not so difficult. The fact we don't have it in the west is not because it is illusive or hard to find., Hundreds of millions of people here - people with nothing, materially, to speak of - have it. So for us in the West to find it perhaps we simply need to stop thinking that finding hapiness is in anyway about *aquiring *something or *getting *somewhere, but just a shift in our perception to see that whatever we have right now - even if it is not as good as the Jones's - is perfect. And to train our brain, and our imaginative faculties to view what happens to us in this way so that we don't get mirred by the bleak unfair times, but instead hope. And as well as helping us towards the hapiness that should be our birth-right, such an attitude shift would also start to give the planet and its people the protection and respect she needs. And without this then we really may be in trouble. But there is much to see in the hearts and minds of people I meet here to think such a change could be possible - and maybe bloodless, and maybe soon. Even the incredibly wasted Brits whose Withnail-style posturing would make Bachus reach for the Alka Seltzer (guys, we don't own the place any more, and no matter how drunk and drugged up we are, we can't pretend we do, or indeed act as if everything we did back then was ok!), even they seem to get it eventually. We're sick of living miserably in office cattle pens, working like dogs so we can afford to pay off the bill for the things we worked like dogs to produce. God is hope, as someone said to me. And we need hope now - for the more I look at it, the more it feels we have the most important task on this planet - we are custodians of a miracle. For millions of miles in all directions there is nothing, nowhere like this. There is no backup plan or second life. It's this. It's beautiful and incredible, and our society may be like a teenager refusing to listen to the wisdom of his parents and tidy his room and quit smoking. But we are evolving. And there is hope here. Tho there is much to be done. http://www.netribution.co.uk/content/view/1424/277/ -- DEV BOREM KORUM. Gabe Menezes. London, England
