Turn on, tune in, Goa’n outta style
Elisabeth Ramnacher, a German who prefers to go by the name Yogini, wanted to show her employees what Goa used to look like back in its hippie days. The only trouble was, she couldn’t find a picture of herself with clothes on.
When hippies travelled overland from Europe to India decades ago, Goa was often the final stop on the trail, welcoming to its beaches westerners who wanted to drop out in a place where living was cheap, drugs plentiful and swimming nude the norm.
“Goans’ attitude and openness allowed the hippie culture to thrive,” said Ramnacher, 58, who first came in the 1980s and now owns the popular Villa Blanche café here in Goa.
But most of the original countercultural community is now gone. It has fallen victim to age, higher costs of living and the death of the hippie trail in the late1970s, as wars closed the route.
The final blow came, remnants of the community say, when the government started cracking down a decade ago on the informal businesses the hippies had set up to support themselves.
Today, Goa’s renegade lifestyle attracts an entirely new type of traveller — young Indians who are flocking here not to find themselves, as the hippies once did, but to celebrate their bachelorette parties or dance atop bars.
As India’s economy booms and builds a middle class that barely existed two decades ago, Goa has transformed from a laid-back enclave for bohemian westerners to a mass tourist destination for Indians.
“Goa is not Goa,” said David D’Souza, the owner of Tito’s, which started as a beach hut restaurant built by his father in 1971, and is now a throbbing open-air nightclub. “It’s India now.”
Tito’s shares a street crammed with similar clubs, like Bollywood Discotheque and Cocktails and Dreams. A stroll through the neighbourhood is an assault on the eyes and ears, with neon signs glaring and drug pushers sometimes shouting to sell their merchandise, trying to be heard over a cacophony of electronic music bearing down from all directions of the night sky.
“Lots of Indian youngsters have made bucket loads of money, and they just want to blow it,” D’Souza said. “It’s a lot more yuppie now.”
Last year, Goa’s state minister for planning called north Indian tourists the “scum of the earth.”
Goa, India’s smallest state, was a Portuguese colony until 1961, when Indian troops annexed it.
Goans describe their own lifestyle as “susegad,” from the Portuguese “sossegado,” a term conveying the chilled-out contentment that comes with living here.
Residents, and long-term visitors, are worried the influx from the north could change Goa’s tolerant culture.
“Goa was a place to let your hair down, to be who you want to be,” said Stafford Braganza, 45, whose family is from Goa, but who lives and works in Mumbai as the head of makeup and technique at L’Oréal.