*Financial
Times March 5 / March 6 2005
Rags and riches in glorified Goa
Flower children age ungracefully in India's pretty coastal state, writes
Justine Hardy
They call them 'raggy-taggys', with that Goan knack for finding words both
onomatopoeic and visual for everything from bhang to crocheted bikinis - the
latter being 'ladee teabags'. There are those who say these raggy-taggys are
part of a modern malaise that has hit just about every sun'n'sand strip in
south-east Asia.
Goa, India's west coast tourist trap, was perhaps the first to be infected by
the hippy crowd. Its palm fringes were hemp heaven in the dog-end of the 1960s
for kids rolling their nirvana between Rizlas while John, Paul, George and
Bingo were rolling out the mantras with the Maharishi beside the banks of the
Ganges in Rishikesh.
The flower babies stayed on in Goa, their every trait the antithesis of Paul
Scott's veranda-entrenched remnants. These New Age hangers-on just got older,
their skin resembling the wrinkled red earth on which they built their bars,
their chill-out lounges and their beach huts.
In Goa, the ladees in tea-bags are represented by a certain kind of traveller.
They are that snobbish variety that snarls if you call them tourists, who laugh
at the cleanliness of your clothes, sneer at you for staying in a hotel with a
nightly rate that would keep thorn in dope for months and despise you for not
getting into their version of the "real" India.
Perhaps they are right. There are those who live happily in trancelike states
for decades at a time, but in the haze of passing time they lose the ability to
see themselves as they really are They do not have to watch their own downward
-Spiral of drug use and disangement, and cannot see the irony in the fact that
they wear a uniform - the dreadlocks, the piercings, the tattered tie-dye -
like the drudging classes they claim to have rejected. And in that grubby
uniformity lurks the genuine belief that they are on some great and important
quest. In pursuing this, they block out the ugly reverberations around them,
the impact that they have on life in fishing villages from Rajabag to Terekol.
This is not to say that the raggy-taggys have uniformly bad taste. For the past
40 years, they have discovered that Goa is a place where they could explore
India's trove of spirituality, massage techniques and narcotics in the balmy
comfort of a seaside state that enjoys a higher standard of living than most
other Indian states. Of course they want to stay - wouldn't you? - and the
local people have made it possible for them to.
Da Costa and D'Cruz families by the dozen saw the market opportunity that came
with their permanently 1960s visitors. They started to open up bars, seafood
restaurants, cheap hotels, beach huts and bakeries where the raggy-taggys could
get chocolate cookies and croissants, and so achieve almost a complete escape
from rice, dhal and the rawness of the subcontinent. Goa became a destination
divided into extremes: the raggy-taggys and five-star resorts. Those that
stayed at the resorts were protected by high walls and high prices. rarely
straying beyond the big gates, except perhaps to go and look at the
raggy-taggys, who themselves had become a bit of a tourist feature. One result
was that people began to slay away, heading instead for next-door Kerala
because it was better promoted, and had more variety for the middle income
western tourist.
Then there came a sea change in Goa. It was not a sweeping thing but a small
movement that created a few private hoteliers who opened stylish homes with all
the grace of colonial architecture common to the grand houses of this formerly
Portuguese colony, with white-pillared cool and a fusion on sunlit colour. One
of these is Siolim House, a Portuguese casa de sobrado, a 300-year-old manor
house that once belonged to the governor of Macau.
[Blank] bought the property in a state of crumbling decay. With his drive and
his wife's good eye, they restored Siolim as a place that is part palazzo, part
home; part air, part light. It exists in a bubble, removed from the rest of Goa
on the edge of Siolim village, one of the rare northern coastal villages that
somehow managed to escape the interest of the bhang and bhangra set.
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