JUGGLE-BANDHI
Jug Suraiya
17 November 2011
As it has been since i first visited it 33 years ago, Goa is lush with greenery and the graceful sway of palm trees. There’s only one problem. The greenery and the palm trees are now made of cardboard and wood: they are painted onto huge hoardings advertising luxury villas, high-rise apartments, five-star hotels. The hoardings showing the natural beauty of Goa – its gold and silver beaches, its sun-spangled sea, its exuberance of green foliage erupting out of the rich, red earth – are everywhere. So much so that they seem to smother the real Goa and replace it with a cut-out substitute advertising yet another property development. Goa is no longer landscape; it has become real estate.
Everyone wants a piece of Goa. Particularly builders from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Goa is being gobbled up by a greedy appetite that seems to know no bounds. A holiday home in Goa is the latest must-have status symbol in metropolitan India. Gracious Indo-Portuguese homes, a hundred years or more old, with their tiled roofs and shuttered windows like eyes heavy-lidded with sleep under the shade of ancient rain trees, are being torn down to make way for raw cement monstrosities with names like Dreamland Villas, Akash Apartments, Sun ‘n’ Surf Resorts.
I’m a sceptic about man-made climate change. But in Goa the local climate does seem to have changed over the years since i first went there. Thanks to the rash of concrete spreading over its fields and hills, Goa is noticeably hotter than it was. Home air-conditioners, once a rarity, are increasingly a necessity. Every Dreamland Villa has to have at least two, maybe more. The inevitable result? Long hours of daily power cuts, which Goa rarely experienced before.
The construction boom has resulted in a parallel growth of motorised traffic, choking the roads and the narrow, winding country lanes, exhaust emissions adding to the heat-island effect. For the first time i witness massive traffic jams in and around Panaji, made worse, paradoxically enough, by a temporary disruption in petrol and diesel supply. Desperate for scant fuel, snaking queues of cars, two-wheelers and buses spill out onto the streets.
The traffic snarl-ups lead to explosions of road rage. Road rage? In laid-back Goa, fabled for its ‘sosegade’, its don’t-worry-be-happy philosophy? Apart from Dreamland Villas, Goa also seems to be importing Dilli’s in-your-face aggro. Which would be a tragedy, not just for Goa but for all of us who might not be Goans but who love the place and all that it once represented, and still does against mounting odds.
What is it that makes Goa a paradise, a paradise so sought after by all and sundry that today it threatens to become a purgatory? Its natural beauty, its tranquil, unhurried pace of life are part of it. But perhaps the most inviting thing about Goa has always been its hospitality, its welcoming inclusion of the outsider, of the passing stranger. All traditional Goan homes feature beside the front steps two in-built stone seats for the comfort of weary passers-by.
Goa’s generous hospitality has long been abused, first by the Portuguese who came in without so much as a by-your-leave and hung around for almost 450 years before being persuaded to leave with the help of an Indian army boot in their pants. Goa celebrates its 50th anniversary of liberation next month. But even as it does so, it’s witnessing another invasion: that of rapacious property ‘developers’ who will bribe, bend and break all rules to turn the Goan paradise into the unholy, unplanned mess that is the rest of urban India.
The signboard pointing to Goa has always been a welcoming ‘Goa Way’. Maybe its time to change that by shifting the ‘a’ in Goa so as to tell unscrupulous exploiters to ‘Go Away’.
