Lessons from Goa

Youth Employment

Vikas proudly wears a black t-shirt that proclaims “Security, V.P. Cavelossim”. Vikas comes from Gautam Buddha Nagar, the western Uttar Pradesh district that includes NOIDA and Greater Noida, and is one of the most prosperous in his home state. Vikas is employed by a U.P. based contractor who runs public toilets in several South Goa Village Panchayats.

I see Vikas at first light when I cycle out to the end of Mobor beach, where the Sal river meets the sea. He is perched on a log, looking to intercept “Jharkhand ke labour-log” from defecating in the mangroves. When I return from a swim, he has finished cleaning out the toilets, and is scrunched into a broken plastic chair outside the tin-shack of his toilets, peering into his phone, his face alight with the joy of talking to his nephew at home.

Where do you sleep, I asked him. Come, take a look, he said proudly. He unlatched a yellow sheet-metal door between the women’s toilet and the men’s, and showed me his stall, three feet by six. The metal floor was swept clean and swabbed, the cotton mattress had been rolled into a corner, and a change of clothes hung just under the corrugated roof, backlit by the strong Goa sun. An aluminium vessel sat atop a mini gas cylinder. “Yes, I’ll make myself daal-chaaval for lunch”, he said when I asked.

Vikas is nineteen.

Sonu is eighteen, and comes from Koderma district in Jharkhand. He waits tables at a shack on the beach, but as the days passed, I learned he did much else - swept the floors in the morning, laid out mattresses for the sunbeds, folded paper napkins for the tables, and rushed onto the beach to tell casual visitors that sunbeds were reserved.

“Mujhe nahin pataa thaa ki yeh 24x7 kaam tha”.

I asked what brought him here. To Goa, I meant, but he read the more important question, why is an 18 year-old boy working in a shack.

Stuff happens, he said, philosophically, if not happily. His father was a truck-driver who borrowed money to buy his own truck. The income was not enough to repay the instalments, and the truck was repossessed. The father has been overcome by his fate, and stopped earning. Sonu is now supporting the family.

We came out to the shack on full-moon night, to watch high-tide flood the beach. I told Sonu and Ganesh the tide would peak - at 10:34, I think the app said. “You have an app for that?” one of them asked. There is an app for everything I said, but don’t look at my phone - go out and look at the moon at its zenith, and how it pulls the tide from far shores. Sonu rushed out into the night, came back with eyes shining from delight in new-found knowledge.

I cleared my tenth Boards, he had told me, with 81 per cent marks. The next morning, I asked him to send me his marksheet.

“89 per cent in Science - that’s very unusual for someone from small-town Jharkhand”, Ayush responded when I forwarded the marksheet to him. Ayush would know - he grew up in Dhanbad, a neighbouring district, and founded iDC, a leading educational counselling company.

Can we help you to get back to studying, Ayush and I asked Sonu. He said he would think about it. A few days later, I recruited Deepak, a young friend visiting from Bangalore, to encourage him, and underline that our support would be broad-based and consistent.

“How much positivity can I have?”, Sonu asked me a few days later. The way he used that unexpected word exposed me to layers of negative experience people like me don’t encounter. We hugged when I left Cavelossim beach on Saturday morning.

“If ever you decide to study, you have three numbers you can call”, I reminded him, “Ayush’, Deepak’s and mine”.

Tourism As A Vertical

The Goa media was dominated by debates about whether Goa tourism has peaked. When ‘Influencers’ on social media said foreign tourists have ditched the state, the Tourism Minister alleged they were part of a conspiracy.

I think the honourable minister complains too much.

For Indians, Goa remains a favorite holiday destination. Despite a second airport, the departure lounges are packed, and the security lines backed up, any time of day. But foreign visitors have halved, from almost 1 million in 2019 to about 450,000 in 2024. Frankly, I’m not surprised.

India is a daunting prospect for most foreigners. Our traffic is chaotic, garbage disposal patchy, waterways clogged, and urban infrastructure shambolic. In Goa, add a taxi cartel with excessive prices, and stray dogs that run after tourists on beaches.

But this is not just about Goa. On paper, India gets about 10 million foreign tourists a year, half as many as the single city of Istanbul. Of these, One in every four is from the Indian diaspora, here to meet family and friends. One in five is from Bangladesh, many here to seek work. Less than half of foreign visitors travel to India for what our ministry describes as “Leisure, Holiday and Recreation.” Less than five million ‘real’ tourists a year, for a nation that boasts the Taj Mahal, God’s Own Country - Kerala, Ajanta, Ellora, tigers, elephants, medieval forts and temples, the shimmering Himalayas, mountain desert, mangroves - a cultural and geographical diversity and heritage that is unrivalled.

India is not attractive for tourists because contemporary India is not attractive. Our air is polluted, our streets unsafe, and our hygiene levels compromised. Other nations continuously raise the bar of order, efficiency and hospitality, and we are falling behind.

This is not just about tourist operators. Tourism is not a vertical. Tourists are exposed to a nation in a horizontal manner - they deal with immigration officials and taxis, with buses and railway toilets, with banks and eateries, with street corners and beggars, with pavements, if they can find them.

The Goa tourism minister said we should not compare his state with a nation. The point is taken, but since he was probably referring to Thailand, it might be instructive to understand why a nation that is a twentieth our size attracts 35 million tourists a year.

The Tyranny of Dress

We left Goa with a carry-on suitcase each.

“Such a full life we’ve had here for two months,” my wife observed, “and these are all the possessions we required.”

The tropical climate helps. I doubt I could live two winter months in Delhi with the clothes I could fit into a carry-on. But more than just the weather - it’s also about conforming. And conforming is related to belonging. On holiday, you don’t belong, and can be liberated from the need to fit in.

British pensioners were a sizable chunk of the winter population in our holiday village. Unlike us, they exhibited all the signs of a tribe. During the day, they wore little more than generous slatherings of suntan lotion, but in the evening, they gathered in the watering holes of Cavelossim, the freshly-shaved men in carefully pressed summer casuals, and the women in evening colours, with more than a touch of bling.

We found no tribe to attach ourselves to, and only my sense of smell dictated when I changed my clothes. If I hadn’t run too hard that morning, my shirt was good enough to put back on after a swim and a beach-side shower. At a pinch - and most evenings could be described thus - I could still wear it to dinner at the little eatery across the road.

It’s a small task, really, washing a running shirt and hanging it out to dry in the hot Goa sun. As is shaving. Was my avoidance a series of minor rebellions? Extreme laziness? Both? I don’t know, but it seemed part of a flow that avoided routine and prescription, and allowed me to float through the days on a cloud of well-being, and self-absorption.