Goin Goan Vol. II: Election Time

The first few weeks I spent in Goa were the build-up to elections, which provided a great deal of inconveniences to those who drink, go out, and drive without a license (which I was all 3 of).

After a few days of doing work at a Café Coffee Day© down the road (think more playful and bright colored Starbucks with lame jokes on the walls and menus e.g. ‘Pull to shed calories’ signs on the doors) and then jamming and drinking with Anirban and his roommates at night, I booked a bus ticket to head South to Kerala. The gods of bus travel disapproved, however, and my bus was cancelled.

Instead of getting another bus ticket, I decided to stay in Goa—I mean, why not? I had a place to stay with cool roommates, a motorbike, and tropical beaches all around me.

The only thing wrong with my surroundings was that they were undergoing elections.

In the few weeks prior to the bi-annual culmination of democracy in the state of Goa, the incumbent government likes to piss everyone in the state off by instating strict laws on curfews, noise ordinances, and alcohol sales, as well as an increased police presence at certain high traffic areas.

I’m not quite sure why they do this, I am convinced that no one really feels any safer when the Goan police are around; these guys pretty much just hang out at certain intersections and pull people over. They then proceed to write your name down on a clip board and usually ask for money (from the white folks, at least). I found out later that some of them like musicians more so I always kept my guitar on my back; one time I actually sang my way out of them fining some Russians I was hanging out with for not wearing helmets.  

Another part about elections that puzzles me is the dry days. In Latin America they prohibit the sale of alcohol the day before and the day of elections, presumably to have a more responsible, or at least less drunk, voter base. In Goa, they choose four seemingly random days per week in the two weeks prior to elections to ban all alcohol sales. If anything, we actually got drunker on dry days because we would stock up prior and it seemed like more of an event, a drinking holiday of sorts.

Then there was the noise ordinance that kept loud music from being played after 11pm for the two weeks prior to elections, because any fool knows a rock concert 12 days before you choose your local leaders will surely cause you to make a regrettable choice. I wouldn’t have had quite the problem with this rule that I did except some popular clubs had apparently paid the cops off to have late night parties any way, and all these clubs specialized in 220 bpm bass heavy electronic shit, oops I mean ‘trance.’ I found myself at least twice at said parties, wondering why I was there and not at home getting some rest.

It’s hard to believe it, but I survived the dreaded election time with minimal emotional scarring. And it would have taking a lot more than illogical party bans to keep me from smiling whilst I sat upon my steel-horse (read scooter) and cruised around a tropical paradise.

'Something' in Goa

I decided at the last minute to go to Goa, despite the condemnations of the place from my pretty devout Muslim hotel owner in Mumbai ('all they do is drink,' 'there is nothing there but trance music and drugs,' etc. [after a month here, that’s not completely inaccurate]). While waiting for my bus outside a water bottling plant in North Mumbai, I met two guys about my age who were going on the same bus as me. They were pretty clearly gay, but if you know me you know I don’t care about sexual orientation at all (I like to select my friends based on things like coolness); we hit it off and ended up rearranging our seats so we could sit near each other on the bus. It was a long and bumpy overnight sleeper bus but I managed to get 5 or 6 hours of light sleep. Over the course of the bus ride we decided to split a room for economic purposes, and come to find out a friend of theirs had already reserved a room for us. I always love avoiding walking in street clothes with my pack in a tropical environment searching for a hotel, but I don’t love it quite enough to actually plan or make reservations (it’s worked out for me so far!).

When we arrived in Goa, I instantly got the feeling that I was in some kind of quasi-Latin American parallel universe. There was a big catholic cathedral situated right next to a bright orange Hindu temple blaring chants over the loud speaker, and the language in Goa is a mix of Portuguese and local Indian languages, so I could understand about 12% of the words from my knowledge of Spanish (a considerable improvement over the 0% of Hindi I could understand in Mumbai!). Once again the slacks and mustaches made me feel like Ron Burgundy was lurking around the corner; or perhaps people were earnestly discussing the battle between disco and rock over a Tab© soda.

We ended up, despite our explicit questioning, on the wrong bus to the beach. This was actually nice though, because it afforded us time to have a morning tall-boy can of beer while we waited for the correct bus. We weren't quite finished with the second man-can when the correct bus finally came, but I had the distinct feeling from what I had seen around me that no one would say anything if I imbibed my beverage on the bus… I was absolutely correct.

To get to the room we were staying in, we had to walk through a back alley about 3 feet wide, dodge clothes lines of numerous households, and walk through a few back yards, all of which included rubble, burnt trash piles, and cows. Our place was actually really nice, and the landlord was a big, sarcastic, dark skinned Indian man with a huge mustache and an outfit that almost always included wearing boxers in the stead of pants and a silver cross on the outside of his shirt or tucked away in his impressive chest hair when topless. I ended up staying there almost a week, and I guess he appreciated my sense of humor as much as I did his because he gave me a pretty hefty discount when it came time to pay him, without me even asking.

We went down to the beach and wound up at a beach bar that I would later become a regular performer at; we drank numerous big bottles of Kingfisher© Strong beer and jammed out to some light-day-happy-psy-trance, or something like that. 

I love music, but I find it very hard to connect with trance, a problem that very few others in Goa seem to have. I have been, nonetheless, trying to make sense of it, though; I always ask a trance fan what kind of trance I am listening to. It seems there is a gradient of light to dark, which refers to the texture as well as what time of day that it’s good for, and then there is psychedelic, which I believe means something different than the word describing such psychedelic classics as 'Innagadadavida' or 'White Rabbit', because I could hear no connection whatsoever. The beats per minute are also important, and it seems the later at night a song is played, the faster the tempo is (just for fun, try listening to a dark trance bass line at 220 BPM; if you are like me, it will likely bring you massive amounts of distress). 

After a month of daily exposure, I can say that to get the full experience of trance, it might be necessary to take MDMA or LSD, two things I have no desire to do (I like my current consciousness a lot, so I ain’t fixing what ain’t broken, as they say). This brings me to another thing I don’t like about trance; it’s really hard to talk to women when they are twisted on drugs of such a caliber, which takes away about 60% of why I like to go to dancing establishments in the first place. But I digress, and we wouldn't want that to happen on a blog... so back to the day at hand!

After about 11 hours of beer drinking and an hour of dancing to inhumanly fast music, we took the next logical step: go back to the guesthouse and drink liquor. It was there that my friends finally came clean to me about their orientation… sometimes I feel like it’s a shame that we live in a world where it takes inebriation for someone to peek out of the closet, but that is neither here nor there, I suppose. Now that that was out of the way, life was just that much more comfortable.

While walking on the little roads next to the beach and through the backyards filled with livestock and the smell of burnt plastic, I started to feel something. The hippies here didn’t piss me off that much; they seemed pretty legit. The international array of women attracted me; options, options, options. The law enforcement seemed lax to non-existent; a friend would later tell me he loves living in Goa because you can ‘bend the rules.’ It wasn’t the absence of cops, or abundance of girls, or the presence of homemade clothes, though, that was making me feel this ‘something.’ I still can’t tell you exactly what this ‘something’ in Goa is, but I can tell you that my weekend trip to Goa has turned into a month, and I am still feeling it every day when I wake up, and it makes me smile both to myself and those around me, and I have been laughing on a notably regular basis (and no, the abundance of hash is not to blame either, although it may play just the slightest of roles).