December is the time of the year that is holiday time for Indians, and Christmas time for Goans. The last month of the year sees many freaking out before jumping into the New Year, and families in Goa uniting or spending the last days of the year together.
Soon, 2023 will be over and – each past year appears to get over faster – a new one will dawn, and except for the celebrations from Christmas to New Year, life will go on with a few bleeps here and there.
December is getting to be a tiring month for many in Goa, and especially for those living in the coastal belt, because as each year passes, the growing influx of tourists, and lack of proper infrastructure to sustain them, is making life for the locals go from bad to worse.
After mining, we laid our bets on tourism and that overkill from mining is nastily settling on tourism, and the authorities and we ourselves are unable to draw the line of where enough is enough.
Too much greed finished mining, and too much greed is going to finish tourism.
We are running into the second week of December, and apart from the local businessmen in Baga, Calangute, Candolim and Vagator, the tidings are not good for most, who are unable to even find sufficient coins in their pocket to hear them jingle.
As we come to the close of the second season after the pandemic, the writing is getting clearer – we have to start discovering new avenues of employment or allow the situation to go from bad to worse.
Today, Goa has a crazy concentration of hotel rooms, and yet, few occupying them.
The foreigners may have stopped coming, but the Indian tourists are coming, and this is how we try to run away from reality – one that is painful because an Indian tourist cannot be compared to a foreign one.
If the Indian tourist was better because he can spend more, then there wouldn’t have been a shift in tourism from enjoying the sun on the beach to celebrating weddings on the beach or choosing Goa as the best haunt for a corporate rendezvous.
The Indian idea of a holiday is different from that of a foreigner simply because we are culturally not in tune. Just the way Goans, many times, find it difficult to be in tune with their Indian counterparts and for a simple reason that the former were ruled by the Portuguese and the latter by the British.
Separated by two rulers, the cultural ethos is equally varying, and that explains why an Indian feels at home in Goa, whilst the same is not true about a Goan in India.
Goa, despite having its own government, always felt suffocated by the government at the Centre, but this time, it is the manner with which we are being sidestepped that is making us feel more vulnerable, and hurting more.
Tourism, today, is mostly controlled by people from outside Goa, and it is not just that the industry is being controlled that is frightening, but the impunity with which rules are being disregarded to fill their, and not our, coffers.
Are we going to be beggars? Not really, but the time will not be too far off when we will need to find out who we are in our own land.
Hotels have come up where there should be no constructions; restaurants have sprouted where there should be no noise. The list is long, but worse is the knowledge that we can do nothing about it.
We can do nothing because when we approach our elected representatives, we are told, “Orders are from the Centre”. A real pity that a person, elected to look after his people, feigns helplessness to the same people.
A shift in our moral compasses has led to casinos, prostitution and drugs, with all of us watching and many joining the fun.
As we wait for the year to end and hope for the best in the New Year, we will realise that the joke has been on us, and just as the mining industry failed, tourism will fail, and we will have none but ourselves to point our fingers to.
