the travelling sociologist

Events:

Greetings from my last day in goa....slowly I can feel my life returning to me, in less than 24 hours I will be on a train to mumbai, and unless amazing and reasonably priced accomodation literally falls onto my lap, I'm planning to go to the airport early and just wait it out.....spent yesterday being driven through goa and bargaining with sellers at anjuna market, spent the night hanging out, today so far has been spent feeling sorrowful and happy at the same time, at the prospect of returning to berlin...here are just a few thoughts, a few conclusions on the trip, while I think of them....

Thoughts:

Calcutta/Kolkata:

Not ever having been to Kolkata before, I can be forgiven for having mistaken it for india..... an intense mad place if ever I saw one, one had the feeling of really being on the edge....having spent a mere week and a half there, i am still too much of a calcutta newbie to judge, but i actually get the feeling that somewhere in the madness there is something I like very much...

Indian Trains:

These absolutely rock....At the wedding I was advised by all and sundry to fly, that taking the train was some kind of living hell, and upon my arrival in the station at Kolkata I temporarily agreed...we actually had to break into our own train carraige before boarding.... every thing after that, though, was fabulous, the people i met, the train chai i drank, standing at the open door, watching india pass by, waking up and wondering where you were...all for 9 euros from kolkata to mumbai....

Mumbai:

Go with another person....this city is just too much to process alone....i'm leaving this one for another time.....

Goan Beach Society:

Lies somewhere between a standard beach resort and a rest home for the temporarily insane....a strange mix of short-termers seeking a baterry recharge, a slighly different way of hanging out on the beach and long term travellers burned out on travel, on their travelling companions, on life before travel, life since travel.....add some lovers with complicated travel based relationships and the set is complete..... here are some of the characters that have livened up my experience....

The Swedish 'Swami': Formerly a punkish drifter, now a comitted yogi, albeit a yogi that feeds his unenlighted side with booze, cigarettes and spliffs for a couple of week each year on palolem....after the new year party ends each year he gets on the road and hits the ashrams, and returns to purity and the search for enlightenment....never mentions very much about his 'secret' palolem life while hanging with yoga friends, and sure as hell doesn't seem to do any yoga here. A night porter and trainee yoga teacher in real life...

Lawyer in the desert: The lawyer is in his mid thirties, based in london,a passionate and engaged guy.... I still do not know what happened to him, what drove him on this mission he is on, but he is certainly on some kind of mission...he has spent the last five months driving across from sweden to india on a motor bike, filming everything, acompanied by one friend..... his arrival in palolem seemed to prompt the release of all sorts of tensions....either from his life before, or from the journey..... spent at least 2 weeks going truly crazy...drinking gin and tonics from 10am till late, babbling insanities, retelling the same stories over and over again.... wandering round in midday sun on the beach, turning redder and redder, his hair sticking up..... he appeared to me, as if he were some kind of shamen on a quest for truth in a desert, speaking to things that were not there....searching for a resolution..... a couple of days ago he seemed to return to sanity.... a sense of calm engagement that i had not detected before came upon him.... he no longer babbled.... he left the gin and tonic to one side, and i got the feeling that whatever he was searching for, he found....

The fear and loathing crew:

Consisting of a few israeli musicians in their early 30's, a french man that drifts in and out like some kind of suave mystic, and an engaging brazilian these guys have seriously been on some kind of altered state of mind quest..... ran into a real problem the other evening when they were all on lsd, as they tried to translate things from french, hebrew and portuguese into english..... as they tried to put their ineffable experiences into words in a shared second language.... some parts of this crew are off to kerela to ride the backwaters on mescaline....

The gujarati boys:

The gujarati boys, quite apart from being extremely funny are also a sociological gem..... thing is, the 'gujarati' boys are actually londoners with, if memory serves, gujarati parents, and they really are as london as you can get.... it is fascinating for me to watch them negotiating india pretty much as europeans with indian faces....they face the same problems with food, digestion, they view india with pretty much the same strange eyes.....like all good north europeans they secretly miss the rain(did a straw poll last night, pretty much all of us from the north of europe do...)....yet for them india is also does not have the same cast that it does for the standard north european.... what is fascinating, deeply true and enlightening for the swedish 'swami' simply gets a snort of derision and a 'that sounds exactly like something my grandfather would say' from GB1, the same guy who once jokingly pondered whether he could get his family to arrange casual sex for him under the auspices of trying to introduce him to suitable marraigable women..... GB2 is quieter, more reflective, and is possibly ready to wander further... I do wonder how he will get on.....
both the GB's try to remember some of what stuart hall wrote on identity.... may chase it up later....

loads more thoughts, but i'm not going to miss this opportunity to catch some of the last goan sunrays i have....

love and greetings

R