The boatman at Arambol pulled his water chariot, his boat,-his
life, his source of living and his second home into the ocean under the
mountainous sunset. The sound of slow drumbeats, reverberating in a rhythm,
from the beach and the wooded hilly terrain, was heard behind him. As the boat
bobbed away diminishing into a dot as it blended into the sunset, the bugle
sounded for another heady and perhaps hedonistic evening, in a land of hippie
dom.
They have gone nowhere. In this stretch, the Goa Gills and Eight
finger eddies have , created space for the new band of ‘renegades’, bringing
with them the same counter culture, making Goa the same laid back enclave it
once was. Make no mistake, reality does bite when you fathom a lot has changed,
but then so has it in every other part of the world. Many, including
international travel writers have announced the passing of time in Goa, from
the hippies to the yuppies (a slightly derogatory term used for brash urban
young, specifically those from North India). Even the New York Times headlined
an article on Goa “Goa’s nude hippies give way to India’s yuppies”.
But times may be changing and yet they are not. Goa’s neo
hippies come for health and rejuvenation aided by the same substances that
fuelled this counter culture which made marijuana and music a molotov cocktail.
Denial doesn’t really help. At least in the sixties and the seventies Goa had
the honesty of innocence (relatively speaking). Photographer and traveler
Michael Palmieri’s photograph of a young strikingly beautiful girl selling
hashish and charas, her wares openly displayed with a board stating “Manali
Shit’, remained as a leitmotif of hippie culture in Goa. Of course there was no
Instagram or Facebook then. Nor did newspapers see or pursue the counter
culture as the “other” culture. These worlds existed in absolute harmony, as they
do even now, in Arambol, Mandrem and other parts. We still have the travelers
from West Asia and Europe, in residence in these parts. A banker wanting to
release his happiness quotient trapped in an invisible wall in a 8 to 5 job, a
woman who had a contract with Bollywood but realised that Aarmabol and Goa is
where dreams are lived, not merely chased.
Darius from Britain felt a big hole inside and quit his job and
moved to Tibet and then Katmandu, meeting people who loved and played music. It
was here that he picked up strains of Irish and Middle Eastern music. But it
didn’t stop there. The band of travelers actually formed a bans called The
Turbans (all members were vagabonds whose homes were, where their hearts were)
and travelled through Nepal and even Pakistan before coming to Goa, to make it
one of their longish base camps, where they return with a regularity and
routine which is antithetical to whatever else they do i.e. defy routine .
For Tobais Moss, for whom “getting lost is all part of the journey”,
died, not too long ago of a heart attack in Ibiza. Goa was his spiritual home.
As a self professed preacher of journeys being more important than the final
destination, he pretty much dropped anchor in Goa and remained one of the best
known foreign iconic characters who added splendour to the place. He went back
to England and formed Karma cabs a fleet of Indian ambassador cars, each
uniquely decorated, to give a flavour of India on Britain’s roads.
For practical purposes Toby was a millennial hippie, long after
many wrote off the hippies and the hippie culture in Goa. But the free spirit
of man doesn’t look at calenders, years or eras. It just follows the path of
the heart.
Ariane arrived from the west, and with a contract to dance in
Bollywood movies and soon realised that was not why she moved to the East.
She still wanted to dance but not to some else’s choreography. Soon she was in
Arambol, dancing at sunrise and at sunset, to music she loved and played to
moves that were her’s. Yet another neo hippie.
Dotted with jam bands, moving to the rhythm of slow drums,
humming to the sound of the guitar but more so the violin or the harp, these
are tunes that have never faded, rhythms that have never stopped. Being a
hippie is more than being without control or without rules. In 2019, hippe-dom
still rules with its own rules and own sets of controls, specific to who you
are, and not what the world tells you to be.
But the free spirit was not always imported. Our home grown way
of life also had its moments, in spirit and revelry. Some old timers, (i.e
before your’s truly, a relative old timer arrived here) often recall when they
sit in an ancient taverns; bars and restaurants which became iconic and
institutional. Anuj Joshi, one of this writer’s dearest friends, cruelly
snatched away by a killer, whose passing away is still not a closure, in a
decade, ran Valerio’s, where music, food and cocktails ran a marathon, drowned
by the only living noise capable of doing so- Anuj’s laughter. We miss you each
day, (now) old chap.
And this brings us to another place which hits at raw nerves,
August Braganza’s, Haystack, where the Saturday Night market stands. Arguably
one of the best musicians Goa has ever had, in terms of raw talent. August was
a kindred soul. He sang and haystack ran on its own, drawing people only
because it was a nest and a comfort zone. August fell to another slow killer,
lifestyle excesses, spending his later years, almost in the arms of dear buddy
Lloyd, spending some nights at the small balcao of Lloyd’s restaurant.
If being a hippie is ferrying your spirit to create and imbibe
such experiences, then all of us who have done so are indeed hippies. Can you
call them renegades? Only if you admit that they are only renegades against
routine. They push back all stereotypes and headlines like “Goa is not India”,
or ‘Goa now is India’.
Goa was
always beyond definition and let it be that way, much like the boatman who rode
into the sunset at the beginning of this story, drifting into an ocean of
nothingness and yet full of undefined possibilities.
