Baga Beach

What a topsy-turvy country of staggering extremes! What impossibly opposite lives are led, often one within arm’s reach of the other, and without a single person stopping mid-stride to scream out at the absurdity of it all.

First, to consider a life in the city where we began this trip: Kolkata. We were thrown into the thick of commonplace destitution, shocked at the level and extent of people’s penury and stunned at their ability to endure such a bleak existence in the face of such crushing futility. Many of the people we met who slept and begged at Sealdah station for example, will never venture further than that filthy city’s limits, perhaps, for the most part, never daring to roam outside of their known territory: the station’s crowded platforms and dusty concourse. Perhaps entire lives may be spent, of sixty or more years (the results of which we witnessed at Mother Theresa’s house for the dying destitute), without ever escaping that hellish, loveless and unforgiving struggle. Each and every night spent sleeping in corners or doorways on the cold, hard and grubby ground, among dashing feet, open drains and skeletal mutts; waking to the dismal prospect of having to depend on passing strangers’ arbitrary acts of charity in order to buy a meager and never-changing meal of rice and dhal. Never having an opportunity to better your situation and perhaps knowing that this punishing daily cycle may well be your lot until the day you die. An entire life. It’s inconceivable! Even if it was possible for a person born into relative privilege to come close to conceiving this sort of life, I don’t suppose words could ever adequately describe its perspectives.

Lives like this are led by countless people not only in the streets of Kolkata but also in every other major Indian city. An entire third of the citizens of Mumbai, for example, live in slums. Everyone who lives in India is aware of their existence; they all must have an inkling of the suffering borne by so many of their countrymen. It’s this that makes the scene that confronts us now so hard to swallow.

Baga is located on a central area of the Goan coastline famous for its exceptional beauty. Its beaches are enormous: deep and blessed with a soft white-sand and bordered by the swaying fronds of coconut palms that, with their thick, nestled clusters of green fruit, teeter improbably on wiry, lichen-spotted trunks. The lazy waves never roll in at anything over a foot high and, breaking into foamy lines maybe ten or twenty metres before their retreat, crawl forward at a constant, leisurely rush that’s soothing to the ear. In the ocean itself, the marine life is as abundant as it is varied. Small wooden fishing boats bob in the flickering waves as the sun sets over the Arabian Sea. It is as idyllic a beach as one could imagine, the sort of place someone might envisage as their paradisal resting place; or at least they might have done, that is, until the mighty, exploitative forces of commercialism decided to set up camp and render this unassuming little spot into a veritable hell.

All along its vast, nearly 20km length, sun beds, 3, 4 or even 5 deep are spaced at intervals of a metre or so, each with its own multi-coloured parasol, in a manner to rival even the most established European package-holiday resort. The beds, sparsely occupied in the morning whilst tourists sleep off the previous evenings sousing, slowly are filled from noon until they are saturated by cajoling crowds swigging from wine and beer bottles. The seas teem with hundreds if not thousands of bodies: women and young girls bobbing tentatively over the waves, gasping at each rising swell as they venture further out to sea; men and young lads diving into the breaks, shouting and boisterously splashing one another. There’s an almost permanently audible background buzz and aggressive irregular slap from the many jet skis that dart in amongst pleasure boats brimming with orange life-jacketed excursionists expectantly awaiting a glimpse of their promised rarely-seen marine-life in some nearby cove. Banana boats bounce comically between numerous slow-moving floating billboards that parade advertisements for local nightclubs, bars and beer whilst pounding out indiscernible dance music; far off in the distance a parachute lingers in the air like a giant jellyfish, silently suspending the silhouette of a small insect by invisible threads.

Behind the beds, again for the entire 20km stretch, lie a line of bamboo shacks that act as food and drink dispensers to the masses; some the diminutive size deserving of the name ‘shack’ and others better described as something like ‘bamboo complexes’. Most of these are topped or are immediately neighboured by vast, garishly-coloured signs sponsored by large multinationals like Coca-Cola or Smirnoff. Above the thin strip of white that quietly announces the shacks’ name in plain black type, the dominating faces of cosmetically flawless models, grasping their bottle of whatever, laugh and smile with supernatural glee and are accompanied by vague and meaningless slogans exploding through the centre, stating rubbish such as: ‘Life is Calling! Where are you?’

Inside these consistently busy shacks, bodies sit well back and strain the flimsy form of the ever-present, white plastic, all-in-one chairs. They sip at colourful, iced cocktails, chilled white wines and towering bottles of beer dripping with condensation. Most have been lured by the blackboards that are propped outside each and every shack that promise an apparently endless supply of world-famous (and wonderfully cheap!) Goan seafood: Lobster! King Prawn! Baby Shark! Tiger Prawn! Kingfish! Green-Lipped Mussels the Size of Your Fist! In the distance, on the horizon, barely distinguishable in the haze, I count fifteen industrial fishing trawlers, each with four or five cranes poised to drag in the indiscriminate haul that will (mostly) go to feeding all those demanding mouths clamouring on the shore.

Just in case you hadn’t been alerted to these shacks’ ubiquity over the course of the morning and early afternoon, then have no fear: when four o’ clock strikes, you’ll be left in no doubt. Soaring stacks of speakers are brought to the forward corners of each of the bamboo structures, like reinforcements against the swelling crowds, and blast out music; often, in eagerness to outdo their neighbours, at volumes which distort the sound deafeningly. Each of these hundreds of shacks thumps out its own inimitable flavour in the hope of acquiring a particular crowd and the resultant effect is one of utter aural chaos; a messy hotchpotch of beats and swirl of instrument and style: here the latest Indian Bollywood song; there Shania Twain; here now some hard-pumping techno.

For anyone reading this at home and imagining the inhabitants of this scene, it’s possible that you may well be imagining swathes of pasty or lobster-red Brits with ‘I Love Goa’ t-shirts straining over their bloated bellies, or maybe tight-briefed, leathery-looking Germans all enjoying their cut-price break in the Christmas sun. If you are, I’m afraid you’ll have to scrap the imagined mob and replace at least four-fifths of them with an entirely different breed altogether. Let’s call them, for want of an official title: ‘The Newly Affluent Indians’.

Before we arrived in Mumbai, we were almost totally unaware of there being many wealthy Indians. Of course, we thought, there must be a few prosperous industrialists and moneyed businessmen what with the burgeoning economy, as well as a small sum of old money enduring in some lines, but surely that’s all there is: a few. Mumbai however, though we were there for only a day and a night, suddenly opened up the possibility of there being rather more than that.

As India’s financial capital and the home of the world’s biggest film industry, Mumbai has evidently spawned some big-earners. Their collective influence can be felt in the city’s arrangement which has a far more European or aspiring American feel to it, albeit with a touch of distinctly Indian disorder and filth. Its central streets, though heavily congested by a higher-than-average quantity of cars (an unfortunate byproduct of increased wealth) are mostly free of the oppressive smell and littered waste of other Indian cities. People seem generally more purposeful and occupied and so there feels to be a smoother flow, less apathy and inertia. But it’s the citizens who seem most to reflect this aspiring Westernisation. We saw, on our wanderings, the sort of people you’d expect to see on a fashionable high-street in London. A mother sauntering through a Waterstones-like bookstore, dressed in tasteful, lightweight designer clothing, casually flicks through a glossy cookery book while her chubby child, dressed in baseball cap and Nike trainers, tugs impatiently on her trousers, whining for something or other. On a street lined with the glittering facades of designer clothes stores, a surly-looking pair of teenage girls clutching mobile phones to their ear in one hand and fiddling with strands of their hair in the other, aimlessly amble in that bored, indifferent way particular to rich adolescent girls, their expressions suggesting a sort of haughty exasperation at the general irritation of it all. Due to the time of these wanderings however- midweek, early evening- we never really saw many men, all of them no doubt hard at work in their offices to bring home the cash and satisfy the rapacious shopping appetites of their spouses and offspring. We needn’t have worried. Baga is awash with them.

Whether from Mumbai or elsewhere, their stories of these revellers must mostly be the same. Most will have made their fortunes within a generation or two. Most will have come from a history of relative deprivation. All will regard themselves as being entitled, in the way that all us successful Westerners have become accustomed, to a slice of the good life. And by golly, they’re really going to go for it.

Swaggering, American-styled Indian men, with basketball vests, combat khakis and unblemished trainers; loud, ostentatious, brash and boorish, demanding sun beds, seafood and booze from their scampering countrymen who cower and acquiesce in a way that relegates their status to that of slaves and elevates the grumpy-looking money-wielders to that of Roman emperors. Some are quieter, emulating the quiet, respectable American family of four: father, dressed in pastel Ralph Lauren polo shirt and cream chinos, a sensible side-parting and wire-rimmed glasses, dutifully leading from the front with a warm and loyal golden Labrador in tow; children and mother puffing away, laden with needless amounts of beach paraphernalia. Others, in younger groups, laze nonchalantly beside one another, so transparently and so risibly self-conscious in their movements, laughter and gaze, with wraparound sunglasses that cover half their face; and the girls determinedly arching their eyebrows with petulant pout, imitating the moodiest-looking models from the Western fashion magazines that lie in their laps.

However, try as these women might to resemble the images of svelte Western models propagated by their glossies, they are woefully let down by something that might reasonably be called the ‘Newly Affluent’s Epidemic’. Nearly every one of these Indian nouveaux is overweight. Some are merely tubby; others titanic. As far as the eye can see: droopy rolls of flab hang over bikini waistbands, men’s breasts bobble as they play Frisbee, cellulite-dappled thighs waddle towards the sea. One man is so round that, when lying on his side, his elbow barely reaches the surface of the sun bed. But this phenomenon is part of something larger. It is a tangible, physical and visible symptom of a broader problem: it feels as if, after a long and complicated history of repression from religious figures, colonialists and the state, a secular, fat-walleted middle-class finally has hold of the reigns and is making up for lost time.

The excitability of this crowd of thousands on the beach has a sense of instability, as if a vast chunk of a population has suddenly won the lottery and wants to start living like stars. They seem to be part of a greater population that’s heedlessly diving headlong into a cycle of conspicuous consumption without much ethical restraint or an environmental conscience- seafood stocks, as just one example, after five years of heavy trawling off this stretch of the Goan coast, are depleted almost to the point of annihilation. After many millions of years of ecological balance and many thousands of years of sustainable fishing by local fishermen, someone out there with the necessary capital as decided, on the back of this economic boom, to bring in his four-craned trawlers and mine the seas of their wealth in a mere blink of five years.

On the surface, it’s easy to argue that the Newly Affluents in these mushrooming economies have every right to enjoy themselves after all their years of relative hardship.
Why not? We have. It would only be hypocritical to suggest anything else. We’ve made mistakes and we’ve learnt from them- let them make their own mistakes and all will be right in the end. I think though, for the most part, people find this line profoundly troubling. In a book I just recently read called The Hidden Connections by a fellow called Fritjof Capra, this rapid development of the Developing World and its sustainability is discussed in some detail. In essence, it states that if the 77 countries considered ‘Developing’ were to achieve the same level of consumption per capita as the US currently achieves, then we’d be getting through 220 times the natural resources used today (as well as emitting 220 times the waste); or the equivalent of three and a half planets. Those in positions of power and influence are well aware of the unsustainability of our current growth rate and yet still it continues to grow, exponentially. The adverts that we see on Indian TVs across the country depicting spacious apartments and glamorous lives, pushing the consumption of their products ever further, fail to mention to their audience of millions that the fantasy they’re peddling simply isn’t possible. And yet those that can, do- as is all too evident here on Baga beach. They may still only be a nominal proportion of the 1 billion population of India but they are leading the way.

But besides this question of how long our increasingly global party can go on for, there’s the humanistic issue that surrounds these grossly distanced lives, lives that exist both in India and the whole world. It’s impossible, in contemplating the mindless excess that exists here in Goa, not to be taken back to when we began this trip in Kolkata. Everyone who lazes here on Baga beach knows of the existence of the pitiful lives we saw and yet they continue to party like there’s no tomorrow, frittering more money in a week than maybe some of their fellow Indians will ever see in a lifetime. It's difficult to attribute blame but it all seems so wrong.