Dr. Luis Dias
I recently wrote a column in response to ‘Ballad of a Small Player’, a 2025 psychological thriller film with Colin Farrell in the leading role. It gave a depressing foretaste of what Panaji and a lot of Goa will be reduced to unless we stop the casino juggernaut right now.
I had titled that column ‘Dead to Shame’, a reference to the Chinese term for a person who has sunk so low that he or she has hit rock bottom, and I wondered if we as a society have also become ‘dead to shame’ in being able to normalise and rationalise the satellite evils that come with casinos and gambling using the ‘necessary evil’ argument.
Since writing that column, I have read the eponymous 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne upon which the film is based.
I can see why Osborne’s writing has been compared with Graham Greene and Dostoyevsky. He shares with Greene a penchant for seedy tropical settings, and the internal struggle of his principal character Lord Doyle in a moral quagmire. And like Dostoyevsky, Osborne’s Doyle indulges in long monologues exploring the “inner workings” of the human mind.
In one instance, Lord Doyle mulls: “I was forced to look at the invisible mirror, and the shocking image there made me want to go blind.”
Dostoyeksy, like Osborne’s Lord Doyle was a compulsive gambler which often left him in such severe debt that he was compelled to pawn his personal belongings.
At another point in Osborne’s book (not shown in the film), after embarking on a winning streak that defies all statistical odds, Doyle feels drawn into Macau’s Se Cathedral. “I knew that I needed to be in a Christian place like the churches of my childhood, and to listen to the voices that always emerged in me whenever I was before an altar.” He sees “the old women kneeling before their Portuguese god who is no longer there”, lights a candle and swears to stake all his winnings on yet another gamble.
A fellow gambler who is wised up to the racket of the casino owners, tells Doyle they are “crooks, pure and simple, exploiting the weaknesses of helpless addicts. The casino is like a hospital catering to heroin addicts. Inexcusable if you look at it sensibly.”
Doyle observes that “You can’t open the windows at the Lisboa [one of Macau’s prominent casinos], because they are afraid of suicides.”
Osborne (through Doyle’s character) sums up in a sentence the sheer lunacy of the premise of casinos and gambling in a sentence, when he observes poor people “milked dry” of their life savings: “Thirty years of miserable slog and labour tossed down the maw of the casino is seven minutes; it was incredible.”
Doyle describes the ambience of the casino as “that clean, fetid, nauseating, pop-nothingness air” and the areas around it a “social emptiness” despite all the tacky glitz and gloss. This is something our ignoramus of a minister Vishwajeet Rane does not realise, because like a little child, he is dazzled by twinkling lights and is blind to the amoral vacuum the razzmatazz embodies. Panaji without casinos was never desolate, it had a soul that the casinos have stolen and that we can only regain when we have banished them and him out of our lives.
Freelance feature writer Ed Cumming called Osborne’s ‘The Ballad of a Small Player’ “an eerie retelling of the Faust myth”, an interesting description. The Faust myth or legend of “a man selling his soul to the devil” is loosely based on the life of Johann Georg Faust (c 1480–1540), an alchemist and practitioner of necromancy (the supposed practice of communicating with the dead, especially in order to predict the future), sorcery and black magic. The legend acquired global fame after the influential German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1842) made Faust the subject of his eponymous tragic play in two parts, written in rhythmic verse and considered by many to be his magnum opus and the greatest work in
German literature.
The mythical Doctor Faustus sells his soul to the devil Mephistopheles in exchange for earthly pleasure and knowledge.
It has been used as a metaphor for many contemporary situations, including the subversion of the democratic and electoral process.
The Russian-born anarchist revolutionary, political activist and writer Emma Goldman (1869 -1940) famously wrote “Politicians promise you heaven before an election and give you
hell after.”
I have been listening to the pre-electoral rhetoric of the candidates in the fray for the upcoming CCP (Corporation of the City of Panaji) elections, online and at my door. The “heaven” that most of them are promising seems to be confined to ameliorating the traffic, parking, garbage and other civic issues engendered by the menace of the casino and gambling industry but not rooting out the menace itself. It is the equivalent of palliative care in advanced cancer patients; one treats the symptoms as best as one can, but resigns oneself to the sad conclusion that the cancer is too deeply entrenched to
be eradicated.
But this is an erroneous conclusion. It is never too late to do the right thing. Compromising with the casino and gambling industry is another variation of a Faustian bargain, negotiating with Mephistopheles.
Goethe adds Margareta (or Gretchen) into the Faustian tale. Faust pursues, seduces, and eventually ruins her and her family. The city of Panaji and indeed the state of Goa are Margareta, doomed for ruin unless we fight back.
Goethe also casts the elderly couple Baucis and Philomen from the Roman poet Ovid’s epic narrative poem ‘Metamorphoses’ in the fifth act of Part Two of his tragic play. The couple’s hut comes in the way of Faust’s grandiose ‘development’ plans and he orders it removed. Mephistopheles goes a step further and murders them.
There is a prescient parallel to our modern-day government’s paternalistic “we-know-best” Faustian arrogance in sweeping away with Mephistophelian brutality anything or anyone seen as ‘obstacles’ to their own hare-brained ‘development’ fiascos, the casinos included.
Toward the end of Osborne’s book, Lord Doyle imagines in his mind’s eye “the tropical forest that this island [Macau] must once have been” before it was replaced by the “social emptiness and “pop-nothingness.”
We look back as well on a time before the River Mandovi and the city of Panaji were robbed of their innocence, and before all the pollution and filth, literal and figurative, began.
When the Colin Farrell film ends, the credits are spatially arranged in maze after maze, a representation of the psychological manipulation casinos employ to conceal exits and keep players in for as long as possible.
Tellingly, a 2017 BBC article on the lessons we can learn from the Faustian tragedy, ends with a Biblical quote with which I had begun another anti-casino column a few Sundays ago: “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”And what good will it do Panaji city or Goa if it gains all the notoriety of a sin city and stacks of ill-gotten blood money from gambling and casinos, but loses its very collective soul?
