Goa: Whoa

I left Pune two days ago on an overnight bus for Mapusa, Goa. Goa is one of the smallest states in India, sandwiched on the coast between Maharastra to the north, and Karnataka to the south. It was a Portuguese colony almost since Vasco Da Gama made it around the Cape of Good Hope in search of saffron that came in packets bigger than your thumbnail. Goa received its independence from Portugal in the early 60's (I think '62), but in many ways remains independent in identity from the rest of India. In so many ways it's strikingly like Brazil; from the geography to the attitude of the people. Interestingly, nobody here speaks Portuguese, even though they have names like Angelo Da Silva. I think Indians learn and forget languages like we do with combination locks for clothes at the gym.

It's the low season, and most places are shuttered with blue tarp and palm leaves. I found a place on a cliff overlooking the Arabian Sea for 6 dollars a day, and am renting a scooter for about 2 dollars a day. Goa is the first resort place I've been to in my life where I felt I could really stay for a while. I'm not the only one. You see Western hippies with big white beards and white Jerry Garcia hair walking lazily down the lanes of the small towns here.

Speeding down the roads on my scooter, I've blown through rice patties, past soccer fields, and through dusty little hamlets, half closed. On one side is hilly forest insulating the inland from the coast, and on the other are rolling green mountains accented with red rocks jutting out like wounds in the smooth landscape. It's been relatively cool, humid and cloudy since I got here. It's the monsoon, which, barring freakish occurences, means that it's cloudy and rains for about an hour each day. All this makes for a relaxed, uncrowded, and cheap getaway.

I met a French couple and have been having dinner with them. The guy has lived in Shanghai for the past 8 years, and is in India to make business contacts to work between the two places. In the old debate over who will take over the world (India or China), he thinks that China will be the winner. This is the first time I've heard that here, which is sensible enough given where I am. About the Indians, he says, "They are lay-zee. You go to a rest-au-rant here and it takes an houaire for service. Thees would nehver happen in China." He does concede that Indians seem to have a spiritual sense, whereas the Chinese seem to have supplanted that with a work ethic. I've never heard anyone since the English call Indians lay-zee. My impression has been that Indians are very hard workers. among the business-types here, all they do is "talk shop", conversation about which degree they'll seek next, which company they want to join.

If the Chinese are really better workers, and that is the sole qualifier for "who will win", then this seems like a race to the bottom. I don't want a future where we all have to work 7 days a week to compete with one another, or just to get by. That seems like the peasant life that our modern societies have struggled to shirk off for the past 400-odd years. While a leisure society, complete with housecleaning, and tax-assessing robots seems out of the question, so does a future of endless work, endless struggle for small scraps of arbitrage opportunities. What is the mechanism for mitigating that future? Maybe it's the places like Goa. Places where people really seem to live a good life.