Posting has been light, mainly because I’ve been visiting family, my sister arrived from Kuwait (with her husband and three daughters), so there are a lot of people in the house right now – 11 in total). It’s a complete madhouse with 5 kids, the eldest 11 and the youngest 2.
And oh, I learned a new victory cheer from my 6 year old niece. This one, who was adamant about not getting her picture taken. You pump your hands in the air, wiggle your hips and go “oh yeah! oh yeah! oh yeah!” Ok kid, so you beat me at Tekken on the PS2, no need to make a song and dance of it.
Goa has begun to feel like a backwater provincial town that’s doesn’t know how to grow into a big city and doesn’t really care to learn. The whole attitude seems to be, “well it worked 70 years ago when the Portuguese were here with their egalitarian ways and insistence on competence in their civic servants, so it should work now that nepotism and corruption are rampant”.
Goa used to be a collection of small villages. And now, it seems to be coalescing into something strangely different.
Back when residences were mostly extended family homes, it was easy to see to the well being of everyone in the home. When I was growing up, that was changing to being mostly single family homes. My sisters and I were what would be termed latch-key kids. My parents left the house key with a neighbor and we got it from her when we returned. Of course, this being Goa, our parents came home for lunch, which gave them a chance to check on us, make sure we got back from school and got started on our homework before they went back to work.
Now, that makeup is changing. With single family homes being priced out of the reach of most middle class families, they are moving into apartment buildings. And these apartment buildings are like gated communities. The apartment my sister lives in (where I’m staying right now) has a full time guard/gatekeeper, and visitors are scrutinized closely. This is what’s happening almost everywhere in Goa.
Going back to traffic. Back when Goa was a collection of small towns/villages, and had a population of about a million (each village had a population of around 10,000). There were three big cities with a population of maybe 10 times that. The other ‘feature’ was that most people took public transport (that actually worked, even if it started at 7:00 am and shutdown at 7:00 pm) and other than that, the only form of personal transport families had were two wheelers (Vespa scooters) and bicycles. So driving on the roads then could be described as a form of cooperative multi-tasking. Think Windows 3.1. It works great, when you have a few applications and each application takes care not to hold on to the CPU.
Most roads in Goa do not have traffic lights and most intersections do not have stop signs. There are few parking garages, and parking rules/conventions are mostly non-existent. This is not a problem when people cooperate. And that was easy when you knew everyone and when everyone knew you.
Now, that makeup has changed. Most people now have cars. There are very few bicycles and I’ve seen a marked decrease in the number of two-wheelers around. Almost everyone has one car with some of the well off families having multiple cars. The traffic rules and conventions still haven’t changed. It all still works on a cooperative multi-tasking model. You think roller-coasters are scary? Try riding shotgun in a car being driven through 4-way intersections with no stop signs or traffic lights. And friends ask me why I don’t drive here. No way. I don’t want to have an accident the minute I get back to the US.
As an example, one of the local banks opened a new branch in the same building where my sister lives. So I went there with my mom so she could open an account. We met the new account person at the bank, and the first thing he said was, “oh, you’re so-and-so and you live in that building in apartment number X”. Remember, this is the first time either my mom or I had met this person. That’s what Goa’s like.
