Goa Gets Mobile

The days when life managed to go on without mobile phones almost belong to antiquity now and no one younger than about 20 can imagine how we could have done without them. This makes sense, perhaps, in a metropolis where it takes an hour just to reach the other side and if you lose your friends in the street, you might as well go home as you won’t bump into them by chance.

In Goa, though, as late as 2001 to even take a mobile phone out of your pocket was to invite ridicule and derision from all and sundry. Fuck off back to the West, you’d be told in no uncertain terms. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to leave behind, thanks very much.

These days, almost no one can do without one. Never mind that you can drive between beaches in about ten minutes, everyone tends to haunt the same cafes and bars and that part of the fun in Goa was wandering about, seeing who’s at home. Sure, you didn’t always find everyone but then often you met someone else by accident or made new friends.

Mobile phones didn’t arrive in Goa until relatively late as the surrounding hills cut off receptivity. The phone companies weren’t slow to exploit the possibilities though and installed a bunch of receptor towers just above a local school in Vagator. In a country where DDT and worse carcinogenic pesticides are routinely sprinkled on crops, trying to persuade the locals that their kids were at risk of brain tumour because of the towers is practically impossible.

Anyway, they’re too busy yakking on their mobile to listen.