What do others find in Goa that many locals don’t see for themselves?
Elliot Rosenberg has been in the news these days for an unusual reason. This US citizen has drawn the attention of a section of India’s business press for saying that he found his home country simply too costly. To beat the ‘inflation’ (or cost of living) there, he settled in Goa, learnt Hindi, found a wife and started two businesses here, as the reports put it. For a tiny region whose sons and daughters have long been out-migrating for decades and generations now, this raises some important questions: what do others find in Goa that many locals don’t see for themselves? Why can’t people from here tap the global potential, even as other newer settlers seem able to? Where exactly are we lacking?
Rosenberg moved out of the US some 12 years ago and has been staying in India for the past nine years. Reports noted that he handles US-based clients.
An old Internet meme goes like this: Heaven is when you have a German car, an American salary, Chinese food and an Indian wife. Hell is when the car is Chinese, the food is German, the wife is American and the salary, Indian! Stereotypes and biases apart, this underlines the strengths and weaknesses, disparities and incomparable costs across the globe.
Maybe two decades ago, cyberspace would joke about a future situation where Americans would be queuing up for Indian visas, while entry into the US would be there for the asking. The long queues to enter the United States have only got longer, and Trump is playing tough. But, yes, there are signs, even if only of an initial trickle, of some wanting to move to countries like India from the West. Goa, being a place where cultures mingle and a kind of ‘India Lite’, as it is sometimes described, is not surprisingly a preferred location for foreigners or mixed couples to sometimes resettle.
Goans have themselves migrated to parts of the subcontinent, and even abroad, for at least a century and a half. Today, it’s tough to imagine that visas and passports came about largely after World War I. Before the 19th century, travel permits existed, but most people could move freely between countries without visas, except in wartime and for political reasons. We forget that many countries introduced visas only after World War I (1914–1918) to control refugees, spies, and economic migrants. Goans, in pre-1961 times, could quite easily travel to other parts of the Portuguese-ruled world (Mozambique, Angola, Portugal) and elsewhere too, including the British Empire. Of course, the means of travel were limited, and costs could not be easily met—even if a ship journey from Bombay to the UK cost as little as a hundred pounds.
But global migration has changed over the decades. At one stage, a number of abandoned children in Goa were adopted by relatively affluent couples in Europe, including in countries like Sweden. They are in their middle ages now. But permissions for international adoptions are not easy anymore. Holiday homes in Goa were increasingly being purchased by European buyers, including British nationals, but that ran into rough weather.
As a small community looking out for opportunity, the Goan international migrant’s eye scours the globe, at the same time as a small (but growing) number of expats would like to make Goa their home. Can Goa also think of ways for its people to also benefit from opportunity elsewhere, even while not completely losing contact with, and getting alienated from, their home state itself?
