Goa's a bit like a rock sample cross-section you might study in geology. It exists on several levels at once, some strata fully covering earlier deposits, other shafts zig-zagging through subsequent generations to the surface.
In this stratigraphic analogy, the law of social superposition applies to each generation of Goan, from the pre-Portuguese Hindus to the seasonal immigrants who maybe just answer to Karma.
Like the rest of the sub-continent, Goa seem like a stable place only from a safe distance, but get up close and you can see it's teetering on the brink of total mayhem. India has its own Tectonic Plate. The whole country seems to tremble from the lack of an underpinning legal system.
Then the Portuguese laid down alter of Christianity. Sandwiched between the shaky subcontinental bedrock and a top-layer of New Age tourism, Goan Christianity is comparatively quiet, private cultural strata. In Hyderabad, the Muslim's brought a slab from holy Mecca to wedge in the Majjid Mosque's outer wall, which market men scramble past 5 times a day under the wafting Iftar. At Pushkar Lake, Hindu families and neighbors amble up the mountain path to Sivitra Temple together, inviting every tourist and rickshaw-wallah along the way. In Goa, the 30% Christian population dress up on Christmas to worship respectfully behind whitewashed church walls.
The surface layer is an amalgam of beach sand, little shells deposited in the surf and the forgotten flip-flop and lost trinket from tourists from all over the world. People come here for many reasons. Some stay at the Marriott and sip waiter-served Mango Lassis from private beach chairs. Some sleep all day on the beach and twirl flaming swords at night. There's a lot of Isrealis fresh from the military with chillums to Trance music. I saw a few Russian couples tattoo'd to the cranium just lounging in front of cabanas and heaps of fried prawns. The pasty Brits are never too far from a Kingfisher or Cobra. The loud Americans are racing to the craggy hill where the parasails take off. The Indian tourists, mostly packs of single men, roam the beaches to gawk at and pester the topless foreign women. And so on... it's kind of like the world's sandbox.
But Goa's most interesting present-day feature are the hippies, gray-haired Anglos in batik skirts and open-collar white linen who poke up through the sands like quartz outcrops. Ten years after the Portuguese left, the hippies laid down a thin but valuable igneous layer. They've been coming here every winter since, zig-zagging through the later 'seedimentary' deposits like attenuated veins of shiny but flaky quartz.
They rent and decorate an old high-ceiling Portuguese villa for a few months and maybe set up a leafy breakfast nook where they can bake fresh bread and pay the meager rent. They run the best spots in Anjuna, missed by even my trusty Rough Guide, and still cling to an underlying Goa, whether real or imagined, despite being surrounded by the vulgarization of their ideals in the luxury hotels and, worst of all, the locals who try to take endless advantage of foreigners, while their welcome presence indicates how rare and cool Goa might once have been.
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