Tag Archive for ‘Goa’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Goa'

Pamella Bordes traced to Goa

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on March 2, 2010

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From the Daily Mail:

She once caused scandal with her links to a minister and a Libyan official. Now, 21 years on, Miss Bordes has a new name and is living in Goa…

As she travels around the Indian resort, she attracts barely a second glance from the British tourists.

And the woman who was once famously pictured stepping out of a limousine in the company of then Tory minister Colin Moynihan, is today travelling alone in a small white Suzuki runaround.

But that is exactly how Pamela Singh likes it. More:

From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Pamela became “Pamella” when the beauty queen travelled west, first to America and then to Britain, where she arrived having married a Frenchman with the surname “Bordes”.

In 1988 and 1989, when she worked as a “researcher” at the House of Commons, she got the newspapers hot and bothered after she was photographed one evening in the company of Colin Moynihan (now Lord Moynihan), the Tory sports minister. She was what westerners consider “exotic”.

She was certainly a pretty girl who was for a while the girlfriend of Andrew Neil, then editor of The Sunday Times. Donald Trelford, the editor of the rival Observer, a newspaper with a much bigger size than it boasts now, also sought her attention, it was said at the time. More:

A different side of Goa

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on February 3, 2010

in India and Travel

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Upscale and untouched, a new breed of villas emerge for travelers seeking seclusion. Jemima Sissons in the Wall Street Journal:

Casa Colvale

As the speedboat turns the corner on India’s moss-green river Chapora and shoots past muddy water buffalo basking in the midday heat on the banks, Casa Colvale emerges majestically into sight. We could be forgiven for thinking that Doctor No or Odd Job are about to pop out of the chic cream and glass villa flanking the hill, and we have to remind ourselves that we aren’t on a secret James Bond mission.

Englishman James Foster, the warm, convivial property manager, greets us with a fresh lime soda as the boat glides smoothly to the pier. “Watch out for the crocodiles,” he chirps, only half-joking, as he helps us off the boat.

We have come to Goa seeking solitude and comfort. If we have gone looking for discreet luxury in India, it doesn’t come better than this.

Casa Colvale was built by clothing magnate Sheila Dhody, who used to come to Goa with her children during the holidays to escape the oppressive heat of New Delhi. “It is a simple love story,” Mrs. Dhody says. “When we were shown this place by the agent there were no footpaths and we had to hack our way through the thick undergrowth. Then, suddenly before my eyes, was the most incredible view I had ever seen in my life.”More:

Diu, Goa for modern-day hippies

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on October 3, 2009

in India and Travel

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From the Times:

In backpack-speak, Diu, an island off the north coast of India, is “Goa 30 years ago”.

It’s only 8km across and was once colonised by the Portuguese. From a writer’s point of view, it also has the advantage of having so far eluded those Westerners whose life’s aim is to be the first to unfurl a towel on any stretch of virgin sand.

Eight days after I e-mailed the Diu tourist board, I got this reply: “The island of Diu is off the coast of Saurashtra, Gujarat. There has been no commercial exploitation or environmental degradation here and with a pleasant climate year round, it offers a fully laid-back atmosphere.”

We were in London in October, so a fully laid-back atmosphere somewhere very far away sounded fine to us. More:

Also read: Why hip hippies still choose India

Rare Konkani film gains Toronto festival spotlight

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on September 19, 2009

in India and Movies

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Reuters:

“Paltadacho Munis,” or “The Man Beyond the Bridge” is the first ever film using Konkani — a language only spoken in the tiny state of Goa in Western India and a few surrounding areas — to be selected among the some 300 movies playing here.

Only a handful of movies have ever been shot in Konkani, mostly due to the small market. Recent estimates put the total number of Konkani speakers in India at roughly 2.5 million, a mere 0.2 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people. More:

[Image: TIFF site]

Caju and conversation

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on June 13, 2009

in Books and Travel

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Once a hippie wonderland, then a tourist haven and now a creative idyll. Zac O’Yeah hobnobs with Goa’s new literary set. In Mint-Lounge. [Photo: Amitav Ghosh and Sudip Chakravarti]:

A regular visitor to Literati, author Sudeep Chakravarti has set up house in Panjim. His debut novel was Tin Fish (2005), which some critics have termed “the Indian Catcher in the Rye”. Like Salinger, who left New York for a cabin in the woods, Chakravarti traded his job as an editor in Delhi for a space to write. And so he is, in fact, the third person, in a short span of time, who tells me about the joy of leaving a metro in favour of a new life in Goa.

Chakravarti’s friends, of course, told him he was crazy when he drew up a list of four places he thought might be suitable for a writer: Mussoorie, Puducherry, Goa and Santiniketan. Goa won hands down. It wasn’t an emotional choice, but a practical one-a decision which brought creativity back to him. “In some ways, I had arrived at a time and place in my life when the urge to pursue a lifelong dream to write books couldn’t any longer be put on hold,” he says. Since coming to Goa he has been prolific, publishing three books: Nos. 4 and 5 are on the way. He also wants to start a writers’ cooperative, The East India Writing Company, to support literary work in South Asia. “You could say Goa and I are in a state of pleasurable cohabitation,” he says.

In Goa, writers are so abundant that they seem to grow on trees. One of the first days in February, at a Kala Academy poetry reading, I bumped into Ghosh. At the youthful age of 52, he has written himself into literary history and nowadays spends about half the year in picture-pretty Aldona, in the bucolic interior of Goa. He’d been visiting for decades, until one day he found himself a crumbling old villa which he lovingly restored. One wing was in such a state of disrepair that it had to be almost fully rebuilt, he explains, after inviting me home to a dinner party. Ghosh’s study, which naturally interests me the most, impresses with its large writing desk, his personal range of hide-bound Egyptian notebooks, and, right outside, there’s a wide terrace suitable for recreational birdwatching. More:

Palolem: Before sunrise, before sunset

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on May 30, 2009

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From Mint-Lounge:

There are three kinds of tourists to Goa: Those looking for a “trip”, who head straight to the northern hippie haven of Arambol; those looking for fun, who camp on the sands of Baga and Calangute; and those who come looking for themselves, and head to the southern idyll of Palolem.

Palolem’s story, like that of all tourist magnets, is one of hype and deflation. Long promoted by Western guidebooks as the secret tropical paradise, the fortunes of this quaint Goan fishing village were changed irrevocably by the influx of thousands of sun-starved, winter-weary Europeans. In the late 1980s, it had just coconuts and fishermen. By the end of the millennium, fishermen were letting out a few rooms to visitors. Now, there are restaurants with near-identical menus and clubs and Internet cafés and laundrywallahs and “Hello-friend-I-give-you-cheap-price” vendors and masseurs (“shakes” and spicy massages also available) and yoga packages and Silent Noise parties and, of course, fishermen accosting tourists for a dolphin-sighting ride. More:

‘I can’t let them get away with it’

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on January 22, 2009

in Crime and India

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In the year since her daughter was murdered in Goa, Fiona McKeown has single-handedly fought a botched police investigation, endured vicious attacks in the media and even faced charges of neglect. She talks to Emine Saner about her traumatic search for answers. From The Guardian:

What can it be like, to stand in a morgue, your 15-year-old child laid out in front of you, and have to take photographs – to zoom in and focus, those images burning on your mind – of the injuries and bruises that scar her body? Fiona MacKeown is searching for the words. “It was horrific,” she says. “I had a friend with me and both of us had to keep stopping because we were crying so much. Just … horrific.” Nobody, of course, should ever have to do anything like this, but MacKeown felt she had no choice. Ever since her daughter, Scarlett Keeling, was found dead on a beach in Goa, on the west coast in India, on 18 February last year, she felt there would be a cover-up. When she was first taken to see Scarlett’s body, she saw a bruise on her head and asked the police officer in charge of the investigation about it. “He
said it had happened after she died, from her head bumping the sand when she was floating in the water,” she says. “So I believed it. But when I read the autopsy, it said it had been caused before she died, so I knew he had lied. The only way I could make people believe that he had lied – the police had also said that there were no marks on her body – was by taking those photographs. It is like one of those nightmares when you are screaming and nobody can hear any sound.”

Initially, MacKeown accepted the police account that Scarlett had been drunk and had drowned in the sea at Anjuna, a resort on Goa’s hippy trail, accidentally. “I believed them for the first three days, but something was urging me to go down to where she was found,” she says.

Previously in AW:

Malaise de Goa?

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on November 16, 2008

in India

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Beneath the idyll of a paradise called Goa, a grim, gritty picture of a state scorched by corruption and apathy. Sudeep Chakravarti with photographer Satish Bate in Hindustan Times:

On a cool evening in mid-October, a hundred or so people, mostly Goan – teachers, writers, painters, journalists, businesspersons, fashion designers and lawyers – stood near one of Atanassio Monserrate’s two large villas near Panjim.

They held candles; an emphatic circle of light. I was there too, wax from a temperamental candle blistering my fingers.

It seemed a small price to pay. After all, I didn’t join in the singing of we-shall-overcome, or impassioned speech-making.

My fingers had not been severed with a chopper, as happened to a Goan lawyer the previous night. Nor had I been severely beaten about the head, as had a young Goan professor of history, as he dined on chicken xacuti with this lawyer friend at a modest Panjim restaurant. It’s why we had all gathered in civil outrage.

Why Goa’s jungle is a shade better

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on September 13, 2008

in India and Travel

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Away from the hurly-burly of the coastal resorts, a new clutch of inland boutique retreats are keeping Goa’s original bohemian spirit alive. Gemma Bowes in The Guardian:

Casa Colvale

It’s not often an A-Z makes for fun reading, but the bedside guide to the Vivenda dos Palhacos (“villa of the clowns”) and its locality is a portfolio of loveliness and wit. A is for “ask for anything”, F for “Frog’s legs. A Goan speciality. Quite illegal,” and O for “oops. We are involved in a long, drawn out war against error. Please let us know instantly about blown bulbs or worse.” By Z (eat at Zeebops beach bar!) I’m sold on this hotel, without having yet explored beyond my gorgeous room.

Simon and Charlotte Hayward, Vivenda’s sibling owners, have infused this Portuguese hacienda 1km inland near Majorda in central Goa with their humour and quirky taste. The bathroom is newspapered with Indian marriage columns, so you can read which upper caste Gemini seeks an educated older husband, dowry offered, while washing the juice of breakfast’s fruit salad from your hands. Beside the courtyard, a brilliant bar, made from the fold-out back of a Tata lorry, is hung from the wall by chains and painted with a multicoloured beach scene, across which pink piranhas and mojitos slide out from the kitchen. Here a challenging strong beer, Haywards 5000, is served, the legacy of the old family brewery business, set up by their ancestors and since sold to a “vast, faceless multinational” they’re sad to say.

There’s something about Mario Miranda

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on August 17, 2008

in Books

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In The Indian Express, a review of Mario de Miranda,compiled by Gerard da Cunha and published by
Architecture Autonomous:

This book makes you do the unthinkable: thank Vasco da Gama for setting foot on Indian soil. And his successor Albuquerque for shifting Portugal’s Asian capital from Kochi to Goa. Lisbon’s men gave Mario Miranda a great place to grow up and outgrow. They packed into the 16th century Konkan land every sign of a European conquest. Prelates and proctors to tailcoats and trousseaus. Seasoned by the West Coast sun through some 400 years, this was the landscape that greeted the six-year-old when dad, Daman’s administrador, retired and the family moved back to the ancestral home in Loutolim. The house itself, then over 250 years old with 30-odd rooms, was a world to explore. A Eurasian galaxy was waiting outside.

The boy loved the wicked pencil. He began a diary of doodles that grew into sketches, portraits, caricatures and cartoons. A spread of visual parody the European Empire builder hadn’t bargained for. A spread that marks Mario out as our only outdoor cartoonist – a comic artist more than a cartoonist. One who learned firsthand from what he saw around him. Not from the printed cartoons of venerable seniors as is customary. An early influence of Ronald Searle the master himself talked him out of. The acolyte was told to go and find his signature tune. He did and how! Goa gave him enough to look at and a challenge few deadline-dreading cartoonists would touch. To include rather than exclude. Mario is so inclusive that when you step into a café with his wall-scale mural, the comic frame grabs you. Grin like Godbole and bear it.

Goa murder: ‘When I remember again it’s like being hit’

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on April 12, 2008

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When the body of Scarlett Keeling was found in Goa many believed her family’s unconventional lifestyle was to blame. In The Telegraph, UK, Cassandra Jardine meets her mother Fiona MacKeown:

A week after Fiona MacKeown (Photo: left) flew back from India with the body of her daughter Scarlett Keeling, life on her small-holding in north Devon is regaining a semblance of normality.

Children, dogs and hens are running around between half a dozen caravans, a barn and the two-storey dwelling where I find Fiona sitting, tattooed and defiant, like a New Age frontierswoman.

The expression on her fine-boned, weather-beaten face is wary but welcoming. Since Scarlett’s body was found on Anjuna beach in Goa, early on the morning of February 18, she has had reason to be both cautious of, and grateful for, the interest stirred up by her battle for justice.

Previously in AW:

Don’t punish the victim

Published

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on March 21, 2008

in Crime and Women

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In Times of India, CPM Rajya Sabha MP, Brinda Karat on the Scarlett Keeling murder being raked up in Parliament

The Scarlett Keeling case has received a great deal of attention. In Rajya Sabha, there was a sharp exchange of views on the case. A view expressed in Parliament that it was the responsibility of parents to take care of the security of their children finds resonance among some people. Indeed, the Goa government and its spokespersons have projected the case as a tragedy caused by bad parenting. They have said that if the mother had been more responsible, if the victim had been a “good girl”, then…
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Also, see previous posts:

Travel advisory

A Brazilian in Goa

Fiona MacKeown: naive, not negligent

Creaky paradise

What her mother had to see

Another family’s search for truth

Who killed Scarlett Keeling?

The land where the hippy trail reaches a historic impasse

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on March 21, 2008

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Adventurous travellers have found many things in Goa. Innocent escape was never one of them. Ian Jack in The Guardian, UK:

Fiona MacKeown was by no means the first parent of a large family to travel from a rambling home in rural western England, in the middle of a damp winter, and see what Goa had to offer by way of diversion. Evelyn Waugh had six children (a seventh died in infancy); Fiona MacKeown had nine (eight since February 15, when her 15-year-old daughter Scarlett Keeling was found dead on the beach at Anjuna). Waugh travelled from Piers Court, a Georgian mansion in Gloucestershire. MacKeown came from a huddle of caravans near Bideford, Devon, a home summarised as “a mountain of old tyres … empty beer bottles … and rubbish” by Wednesday’s Daily Mail. But the bigger difference is that Waugh left his children behind.

He came to Goa in December 1952. “The scenery [is] delicious … the people soft and friendly,” he wrote to his wife.

Travel advisory: pack caution, common sense

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on March 19, 2008

in Crime and Travel

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Namita Bhandare in Mint on the death of Scarlette Keeling, and the lessons we can learn from it

The life and death of Scarlette Keeling has left in its wake a media feeding frenzy. To be sure, the rape and murder of the British teenager goes beyond your average “sansani” (sensational) crime story: There’s the sun and sand of “idyllic” Goa, a heady concoction of drugs and alcohol, a botched police cover-up, accusations of a powerful drug cartel with political links and, finally, the apparently freewheeling lifestyle of Scarlette’s mother Fiona MacKeown.

I have nothing but contempt for stories that focus on Fiona’s past escapades, lifestyle and lovers. I unequivocally agree with Brinda Karat who said in Parliament last week that you cannot victimize the victim.

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I was naive but I wasn’t negligent, says Scarlett Keeling’s mother Fiona MacKeown

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on March 16, 2008

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In The Sunday Times, UK, Dean Nelson meets Fiona MacKeown:

It is hard to classify MacKeown. Her children’s names – including Merlin, Kisangel, Isis Celeste and Trinity Willow – suggest mellow hippiedom. But she defines herself as a gypsy; when she sought planning permission to put caravans on her land she was backed by the Romany council. She is unconventional but when she says she was naive rather than negligent, I believe her. Those who have seen her with her children were struck by how bright, well mannered and affectionate they are.

With her brood of children, MacKeown would receive about £25,000 a year in benefits. In order to pay for the Goan holiday she told me she had saved £200 a week for months by living frugally – buying only rice to supplement the family’s home-grown vegetables and buying clothes for the children only from charity shops. Eventually they had about £7,000 for the trip, topped up by selling a pony for £1,000. It was a tiny budget for a six-month holiday once the flights for nine had been paid for.

Scarlett Keeling: What her mother had to see

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on March 12, 2008

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Andrew Buncombe, The Independent’s Asia correspondent, on his blog Asian (con)Fusion:

Last week, at a cafe in Anjuna Beach that specialises in organic food, the mother of Scarlett Keeling showed me some photographs that I didn’t really want to see.

The photographs were taken during the first post-mortem tests carried out on Scarlett and unlike the written report itself, the photographs revealed the true extent of the teenager’s injuries. The pictures showed a huge bruise above one eye, a series of bruises on her legs and shins, red marks around the genital area and, most shocking of all, a picture of Scarlett’s face.

Because police claimed they did know who she was when her body was found, the pathologists had cut open her face to enable access to her teeth and to take a dental imprint to obtain her identity. They had then crudely sewn it back up. What was left looked like an horrendous, clown-like smile stitched across the teenager’s face.

In Goa, another family’s search for the truth

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on March 11, 2008

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As Fiona Mackeown, mother of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old British teenager murdered on Goa’s beach on February 18, demands a high-level inquiry, Amanda Merritt, whose brother died there, tells why she’s convinced he was killed too. In Timesonline, UK:

After a year of trying to piece together what had happened to her brother, Merritt has recently succeeded in persuading the Indian police to reinvestigate his death. At first – like Scarlett – he was dismissed as just another hedonistic tourist. But Merritt believes he was targeted and killed by members of Goa’s criminal underworld.

Stephen, who had travelled alone in Asia several times as part of a masters degree in Chinese theatre studies, had been taking a December holiday alone in Goa and intended to be away for two weeks. He planned to spend Christmas with his two daughters and had already wrapped their presents.

On December 12 his body was found hanging from a tree, a woman’s sari around his neck, in a village 200 miles from Goa.

Drug dealers blamed for rising death toll in India’s hippy paradise

Jeremy Page in The Times, UK:

Since the 1960s, when the first hippies arrived with their tie-dye and LSD, Goa has been renowned for its pristine beaches, cosmopolitan atmosphere and plentiful supply of narcotics.

But the suspected rape and murder of Scarlett Keeling, a 15-year-old British girl found dead last month on the famous Anjuna beach, has now shattered the Indian state’s reputation as a “hippy paradise”, free of worldly evils.

Goan officials and many long term foreign residents were quick to blame Fiona MacKeown, Scarlett’s mother, for leaving her alone in Anjuna. They insist that the place is no more dangerous than other popular beach resorts.

A British man has told The Times that he saw an Indian barman apparently sexually assaulting Scarlett Keeling less than two hours before the 15-year-old British girl’s half-naked body was found on a beach in Goa.

The witness, who asked not to be identified, said that the attack took place after Scarlett left Lui’s bar on Anjuna Beach high on a cocktail of LSD, Ecstasy and cocaine at 5am on February 18.

Psychotherapy for all: An experiment in India

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on March 11, 2008

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A new program in Goa, India, trains laypeople to identify and treat depression and anxiety and send them to community health clinics. David Kohn reports from Siolim, India, in The New York Times:

At the faded one-story medical clinic in this fishing and farming village, people with depression and anxiety typically got little or no attention. Busy doctors and nurses focused on physical ailments – children with diarrhea, laborers with injuries, old people with heart trouble. Patients, fearful of the stigma connected to mental illness, were reluctant to bring up emotional problems.

Last year, two new workers arrived. Their sole task was to identify and treat patients suffering depression and anxiety. The workers found themselves busy. Almost every day, several new patients appeared. Depressed and anxious people now make up “a sizable crowd” at the clinic, said the doctor in charge, Anil Umraskar.

The patients talk about all sorts of troubles. “Financial difficulties are there,” said one of the new counselors, Medha Upadhye, 29. “Interpersonal conflicts are there. Unemployment. Alcoholism is a major problem.”

Who killed Scarlett Keeling?

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on March 8, 2008

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The man suspected of raping Scarlett Keeling, a 15-year-old British teenager found dead on Goa’s Anjuna beach on February 18, appeared in the local Goa court wearing a police hood. But Scarlett’s mother says she is not at all convinced that Samson D’Souza, the 26-year-old barman who worked at Lui’s Bar and was seen with Scarlett on the day she died, is the right man. She wants the country’s premier investigating agency to take over the case.

Read that story here.

The case has rocked Indian and British media, following allegations of a police cover-up by Scarlett’s mother, Fiona MacKeown who refused to accept an initial post-mortem report that concluded that her daughter had drowned. Fiona has maintained all along that her daughter had been raped and murdered, pointing to the bruises and cuts on her body.

A second post mortem was ordered and found that Scarlett had indeed died of drowning. Significantly, it didn’t rule out homicide.

Meanwhile, media attention has also focused on Fiona MacKeown who left her 15-year-old daughter behind with the family of the local tour guide she had befriended. Fiona, her boyfriend and six other children headed off to a beach in the neighbouring state of Karnataka, leaving Scarlett behind in Goa. In the Daily Mail, Tom Rawstorne reports that Fiona is clear that she is not to blame

It was meant to be great family adventure – then 15-year-old Scarlett MacKeown was left alone by her mother in Goa. Days later she was dead. Murder… or a drunken accident? Here, her mother insists SHE wasn’t at fault.

As she tearfully retraced her teenage daughter’s last steps, Fiona MacKeown’s eye was caught by an object lying on the edge of the dusty track. It was a leather sandal — nothing special — but its discovery started a chain of events that has sent shockwaves through a part of the world still regarded by some as a corner of paradise.

Fiona knew at once that the shoe belonged to her daughter, 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling, whose body had been found on a nearby beach three days earlier.

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And is time running out for ‘tourist paradise’ Goa? Andrew Buncombe in The Morung Express reports from Anjuna

From his vantage point on a cushion in Anjuna’s German Bakery and Café, Thomas Keller smiled nostalgically as he recalled first coming to Goa more than three decades ago. “It was 1974,” said the wiry 53-year-old from Denmark. “[Then] it was serious hard-core hippies. Now everybody can come and go.” And that may be the problem for Goa. When people like Mr Keller first arrived, they came overland, down the hippy trail that wound from Turkey through Iran and Afghanistan to this tiny former Portuguese enclave on India’s western coast. They were few enough in number to blend in among the coastal villages, and if they were in a blissed-out haze on marijuana or hash a lot of the time, nobody minded too much.

Finally, local Goa newspaper Navhind Times pays tribute to Fiona MacKeown in an editorial:

Goa police have started investigations along a new line into the death of the 15-year-old British girl Scarlett Keeling, but the loss that the state government and police – and collectively all of us Goans – have suffered during the three weeks in terms of image cannot be made up, no matter what we do. The adverse publicity we have got has not only damaged tourism but also our reputation as a state that can take up a case in the right earnest – without hiding or suppressing or manipulating facts – and go straight after the accused. How great a gratitude we owe to the mother of Scarlett, Fiona Mackeown! It was her tireless and determined fight for bringing the guilty to book that rocked the international and Indian media and forced the state government to take immediate steps to ensure fair play and justice to the deceased girl and her family.

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