While others have the
luxury of leaving when they find Goa is no longer pristine, it is Goans who
have to continue to bear the consequences of a deteriorating environment.
It wasn’t so much
the issue that Goans were being told that there was something rotten in their
homeland. No, this would assume that Deepti Kapoor was actually aware of the
presence of Goans. To be fair, in her article “An
Idyll No More: Why I’m Leaving Goa”
(The Guardian, 7 September, 2016),
Kapoor registers an impressive set of real grievances. She laments the
pollution of the beaches with “plastic bags” and “shards of glass from …
bottles”. She decries the condition of “the hills and roadsides, covered in
garbage”, as well as “the earth inland that mining has stripped bare”. She denounces
the “floating casinos and effluent” in the Mandovi river. She has decided to
leave, the dream now having turned into a nightmare.
Kapoor tells her
readers that she moved from Bombay to Goa eight years ago along with her
husband so that she “could study yoga”, and because of “the beaches! The
restaurants! The music, and the people!” (Yes, she really is that
overenthusiastic with her use of exclamation marks!) She reveals that “when the
sun is setting over a village called Aldona, and the evening bread is delivered
on the backs of bicycles, you can convince yourself that Goa is all right”. But
nostalgia no longer serving to blunt the vagaries of development, Kapoor feels
it is time to call it quits. Given all the ills that she lists, who can blame
her? Except that it is exactly people like Kapoor who are the problem, and even
more so that they fail to see themselves as being at fault.
For Kapoor, the
inconveniences she lists are something she can escape. Yet this is not the
luxury available to the people of Goa. And if Goans must leave their land, it
is not always because they have a choice in the matter. That “village called Aldona”
is the place my paternal family has called home for more than a century. I
often wonder what my now deceased grandmother whose home once overlooked the
greenest paddy fields would think of the changes in Aldona. What would she make
of the altered landscape, where second homes built to serve as vacation
getaways for upper class Indians have become commonplace?
A wise woman, she
would recognise that the cost of living has shot up to such an extent, that
Aldonkars not of means have been priced out of the real estate market in their
ancestral lands. And in the waters, those Goans whose traditional occupation is
fishing, must continue to rely upon the catch, regardless of the pollution
which threatens their livelihood, their health, and that of those who eat what
Kapoor describes as “shellfish … decimated by coliform bacteria...”, among
other forms of affected water life.
But it is as if
Goans do not exist for Kapoor who like so many other Indian sojourners consider
the region to be solely the preserve of those of their ilk – the yoga-learning
dilettantes and those with the option of decamping to “Europe or Latin
America”, as Kapoor says she might because things in Goa are so rough. Sure,
Kapoor mentions “Reginald or Tulsidas or Lata or Maria [who] stand at the front
gate speaking to that passerby at dusk…”, but in the same way as she lists the
beaches! The restaurants! The music! At the end of which index she adds “the
people”, almost as an afterthought and as much as the backdrop for and the
service providers of the idyllic life she bemoans the foreclosing of.
No doubt, Kapoor
does convey the efforts of some Goans who have been doing their bit to save the
environment. The writer also highlights such entrenched issues as systemic
corruption and an economic overreliance on tourism without the creation of
adequate infrastructure to protect beaches or the tourists who frequent them
(again, it is as if the safety of locals must come second, if they are to be
thought of at all). Additionally, she refers to the destruction of six villas (which
she misclassifies as “Portuguese”) – heritage homes that are being torn down to
make way for luxury apartments that will not house Goans. Of course, it would
be naïve to believe that Goans are not part of the many problems enumerated by
Kapoor, but their involvement in the ongoing destruction of Goa’s natural and
architectural heritage does not occur in a vacuum.
As Raghuraman
Trichur argues in his book Refiguring Goa
(2013), it was the rise of tourism in the coastal location that first made
the Indian bourgeoisie interested in Goa economically. There was once a time
when my parents were able to run a small home-based tourism business, but their
little outfit folded when larger corporations started to set up shop in Goa.
Today, as Kapoor finds, while many Indian tourists come to Goa, they contribute
little to the local economy, for much of the money sustains the corporations
rather than the actual location.
Indians continue
to find Goa attractive as an investment opportunity, with real estate topping
that list. Completely blind to the irony, Kapoor finds common cause to
commiserate with one “Phil from England, who has been coming [to Goa] for 25
years, [and who] said: ‘The joke I made this season was, we all used to say Goa
was not the real India, but now REAL India has turned up’.” Yes, Phil. And that
REAL India looks like Deepti Kapoor, the interloper who got what they wanted,
leaving a mess for others to deal with.
From The Goan.
