Fellas, since it is Monday and 'back to work' schedule of our lives, I thought of rekindling the happy spirit at the start of the week. Below is a note on Goa. Not the one in its present diminished state (though it still is one of the best places in India), but the reminiscent of its legendary days. This post has been taken from 60Kph's blog. Read on and share.
From the hippie diaries: The good ship Konkan Shakti, deck class, two dollars. Beautiful ride (Bombay to Goa): saw many dolphins. Under the canvas awning at the stern, a hundred chilams ignite. Only a month previously had sworn not to go to Goa. Goa now a haven I am hurrying towards, to recover equilibrium after the unsettling psychological pressure of Indian cities. Woken before dawn by irritating hawkers. On the white ferry building, in red letters, a sign: Welcome to Goa. Goa had that run-down, old-Portuguese, lost-world vibes. They had sculpted and gardened it, they brought the cashew and the chilli. And they'd only left in 1961, a few years before the first freaks arrived. The Goans missed that old western connection, so when we arrived, they liked us. We were no threat, and they didn't mind sharing their paradise with us. Before the jeep roads were built and the beaches patrolled, it was a free country, a smuggler's coast. Goa was in Goan hands. They were so laid back: Hello, hello, with a vague gesture in the air. They practised Sosegado, an attitude which made manana seem excitable. Sosegado meant something like, maybe after the day after tomorrow. It was an Island, a rest from India, which, however much one liked it, was rather like being bombarded from morning to night. India exhausted any idea of proportion, but Goa had it. The scene began, I am told, in 1966, with twenty or thirty people. All origins need a myth. After the second war, all the Germans interned for the duration by the Portuguese went home, except for five: these men opened small businesses, married local girls and smoked hashish. When the first foreigners after the war began to arrive, around 1966 or 67, the five Germans fraternised with them. This makes the five Germans the first Goa freaks.  Our first sight of Goa was the Jungle, and the waterways. Our senses were suddenly open, aware, freed. There was the scent of the tropics, the fireflies at night, the sensuality of everything. Suddenly your senses were open to jungle Asia: in its way, this was a kind of “spiritual awakening.” There were perhaps sixty Westerners living in Anjuna, in houses, not in huts on the beach. They were not there merely to hang out: it was a community of people trying to get the old shit out of their minds, the useless stuff they had been taught. Each had his own way, and followed it by himself. Everyone, western, Goan, was a teacher, and everything was, too; you could learn so much from the place. The people had had nearly five hundred years of experience of westerners, in the shape of Portuguese, and many were Catholic: but first they were animist, believing in and worshipping ancestor spirits, and mixing this with Christianity.Why go to Goa? Congenial people. Fewer people. Such a thing as an empty beach. You'd see a few people a day, instead of few million. You could swim in the sea without any clothes on. You simply couldn't do that in India, unless you were a Naga sadhu. Other things you could do: on the beach you could make love. Where else could you do that? On a railway platform, under a lungi? The Goan people were so patient with these nuts living around them. It could be like a psychiatric hospital, I tell you, with all kinds of trips and gangs going on. It was the acceptance, the patience of Goans that made that scene possible. It's a phenomenon specifically of Goa that such a very open foreigner scene should coexist so well usually with the local one. Goan society is stable, traditional and resilient. It was accommodating and ready to change. Now there's two-week package tourism, which will touch them not at all; the big hotels will get the money, and the human relationships will never begin. His fame spread to the West, and he got himself a whole new audience. Letters came to Germany saying, "If there was a God alive on the planet, wouldn’t you want to see him?" Planeloads of Germans were flying into Bombay, straight into Pune, having taken the colour. Bhagwan's (Rajneesh) disciples wore variations on the sannyasin's traditional saffron. Rajneesh's people began to come down from Pune -- we called them Poonatics -- and soon there was a constant flow of them. And later on, the people who did go to Pune from Goa only went for the girls. I have a postcard, printed in Bombay in 1972: it is captioned "Arambol, adobe of hippies"and bears a perfectly unfocused photo of naked people disporting themselves with a Frisbee. By the early seventies, thousands of foreigners were spending the winter in Goa. Indian tourists, too, had begun to visit the beaches, but in their clothes. I do remember seeing a group of bemused Bombayites observing a beach yoga session, and being called perverts by a nude woman in a turban. There had always been parties, but a party was a log of wood, a bongo and a guitar. And a chilam. It was only when electricity arrived at the beach and the WHO sent speakers (despite the legend, they didn't ever come themselves) and the band plugged in, that this vicarious electronic scene began. Once you've got loud rock and roll, nobody talks to one another, and this was one of the factors that had made people leave Europe in the first place. (In Europe talking meant going to the pub to discuss what was on TV the night before.) People came to India looking for a right way to live, a human way, and in Goa they liked to sit around a fire of an evening doing what the rest of India was doing, telling stories, singing, gossiping: but the minute you had some raging rock and roll band on, you were back to the same old shit you'd tried to escape in the first place.  At first Goa was a place people stopped in for Christmas, for relief from the rigours of travel. Then it was settled, and then as a resort settlement, GOA ACQUIRED A SEASON. To everything there is a season: a seed is planted, it sprouts, grows to maturity, withers and dies.In some ways, what you learned from India depended on what you’d gone there as, and for. If you went as a racist or something, you simply came back as one, and England was a relief. If you went for a romp, you came back with nothing but happy playground memories. We had fun, sure, but interesting fun, not the simple tourist variety. But then, India was not a tourist destination. We didn’t want to distance ourselves, nor did we want to study Eastern culture formally, we were simply interested in being in that other world, in living in its as authentically as possible. That’s how you grow, through that kind of lived experience. India expanded your consciousness. But it did, it gave you a much broader base of experience from which to see your own world and act in it. Broader, because in India the experiences tended to be extreme, heavenly or hellish. It was a rare instance of foreign invasion of India not interested in loot. They weren’t on the make, they came here to blend in. One of the things that inspired the India trip was the lack of spiritual nourishment at home. By spiritual nourishment I do not mean that people were seekers after enlightenment. Enlightenment in the East was simply something that might hit you at the bus stop by mistake. Then it might disappear. Then it might return …… You too, baba, sitting there, you’re coming to Asia because you’re getting some kind of nourishment here you’re not getting anywhere else. |
