The Internet Personified: Does this count as gonzo journalism?

Read on for LIVE REPORTAGE from the bar I am at

I’m writing this from a beach resort in Morjim, Goa. It’s 8.31 pm, and I’m being a poseur at the resort restaurant, typing with a Very Serious Expression on my face, while around me tables of mostly Indian families—mixed generations on one, a couple on the other, a group of friends where one set is married with a kid and the other seems to be a single man—are ignoring me, as they should. No one feels like they’re being observed more than the writer at the bar with her implements and her Bloody Mary, cheerfully typing nonsense as the world burns. (Or doesn’t, in India’s case, as just as we took to the Open Road, the gas cylinder shortage was discovered and now I don’t know how long this particular resort will be able to feed us.)

The only reason I’m writing at this bar, at an hour where I should be drinking my cocktail and enjoying my novel—something trashy probably, although there’s also a Shirley Hazzard book I have in my Kindle queue that’s calling my name—is because K, before we left Delhi, made a trip to Nehru Place which is like his Sarojini Nagar which, for my non-Delhi, non-Indian readers, is a giant market which sells only clothes, mostly export surplus. Compared to Nehru Place, Sarojini Nagar is practically a mall, Nehru Place is this giant set of absolute warrens of buildings, each building stuffed, four floors worth, with computer shops. You can get any sort of computer part in Nehru Place and the really deep cuts are the floors on the inside, where you take a lift and then walk through some back doors. That’s where I once tried and failed to get my Macbook Air fixed after I spilt coffee on it, but lost it forever (RIP) and also my desire to own Apple products. (My current machine is, and has been for some years now, a succession of second hand Thinkpads, which you can find in mint condition on listings websites, sold by people who have just left their job and don’t need the new laptop their company gave them two or three years ago,) ANYWAY, so K goes to Nehru Place and returns with a gift for me, a new mechanical keyboard because my old one is v v old and also completely stuffed with cat hair. This one has bouncy keys and I like the tick-tick sound of typing and I carried it across the country with me, imagining fondly great periods of time when I would write and edit and do all sorts of things and here we are about to head back to Delhi and thence, Berlin, and I have not done a single stroke of work. Not that this newsletter is work, of course, it is a PLEASURE. But I felt I should, having a free evening, do a little writing, and so I’m writing to you.

Let me tell you about my travels thus far. I’ll go backwards, because that’s the easiest way to remember things.

Goa is wonderful, as it always is. The nice thing about Goa, for us anyway, is that because we spent a lot of time here pre-pandemic, even renting a little house in Assagao before it became too popular for its own good, is that it feels familiar. I know the vibes I should expect, I know what to eat, I know where I want to stay (since we became tourists, it’s only been beachside, because we enjoy waking up in the morning and going for a swim before breakfast) and we even have friends who we look up each time we’re here. The only problem is, since moving to a very cold city, I seem to have lost my ability to withstand the heat. We walked for only seven minutes today to find a fish thaali—you can’t trust the ones on the beach for quality so you have to go inland, in our case, a little way down the main road—and as a result I seem to have lost my will to live even now after a nap and extensive cool down in our room. I’m either tired or headachey, but the Bloody Mary (Bloody MARRY, this resort calls it) is helping. This is the one place in India that K and I own together, not sprinkled with either of our separate histories, but together as a unit. I mean, of course I went to Goa before we met, many times, but never as more than a tourist, staying usually at Baga or Anjuna (this is before they got gross) and not seeing it as anything else except a place for drinking too much and sleeping late. The resort we’re staying at is extremely bougie, including jacuzzis set out facing the sea, but despite its attempts to be a party place, seems to only be inhabited by large families with small children. The locals, our friends here, say that the place has changed but visiting as we do, infrequently and not for very long, it has a certain timelessness. Not this resort, this is new to us, but Goa in general.

When you, an Indian, return to India after a long gap, statements beginning “Indians are like this” or “Indians do that” seem to come out of your mouth more often. On this visit, I’m wondering about swimming. So many people I know don’t know how, and in the sea, where we have been these past two days, it’s all Russians and us. Where are the Indians in my resort going, what are they doing with their days if they’re not swimming? The answer, I realised, was the very shallow resort pool, where you can stand up in all four corners of it. I saw a fully clothed family, and I do mean fully clothed, t-shirts and pants and long skirts, frolicking in there for several hours yesterday. Prior to this beach we were in Honavar in Karnataka, on a long strip of beach called Eco Beach, where once again, I saw people fully clothed entering the sea and sitting down in the shallows, letting the waves wash over them and shouting in delight. I felt quite self conscious in my two piece, and even considered buying a slightly more modest one piece for my next visit. Only to realise no one was looking at me at all, except out of curiousity, and we are quite a sight, a tall German man, a short Indian woman, both speaking rapid English to each other. On the other hand, I may as well be naked whenever I wear something low cut, “Indians like” breasts, legs not so much. I comfort myself whenever I see a gaggle of young men staring at me aggressively that I’m old enough to be their mother, so I’m allowed to do what I like. (If I had had a baby at nineteen, for instance.) But in Goa, and maybe this is why I like it so much, no one gives a shit about what I wear, there being so much flesh on display that you get sort of immune to the sight, like if you’re a kindergarten teacher and get sick for your first year there because of all the kids sneezing on you and then never get sick again like a Superwoman. I have many female friends who wear what they want all the time and don’t care about the stares, but I’ve never been very confident about that sort of thing, and whatever confidence I have comes from cosplaying one of these friends in my head.

But speaking of clothes, I haven’t done much shopping at all this time which disappoints me, India is usually where I refresh my summer wardrobe for the three months of summer Berlin gets. But nothing this time has been super inspiring. All the clothes in the boutiques have been those long tent-y kaftan-y things made for some ideal version of woman who is straight up and down and tall and so can glide through life looking elegant and at ease. In my case, they just look like large pieces of cloth that fall down like tents with no definition on the good bits of my body and clinging unflatteringly to the bad bits. (Okay, okay, less than the ideal version of beauty we were fed in the nineties bits.) Then too, there’s the fact that Sarojini Nagar and even my hidden East Delhi secret: the Mayur Vihar Phase II Monday Market have yielded very mid results even after extensive searching. My mother says this is because Trump’s tariffs have done a number on the textile industry which we can add to the giant laundry list of things he already has to answer for. I should probably delete that if I ever want to get a US tourist visa again, eh? But let’s be honest, who wants to visit right now and get turned away at the border? Everything is so shit right now, that all you can do is hope for the best and resist, resist until it washes over you. I greatly fear in this decade of my life I have become a nihilist. I have no hope and no optimism any more about the fate of the world, only a small scrap of me hopes all these bad leaders are eventually ousted, but even then, the trolls are out of their cages and they won’t go back in again. At least—ha ha—we don’t have any children, so there’s no one after us to worry about. (Except all the other children.) (Ha ha.)

We arrived in Goa after a three day long road trip with my father from Kochi. It was his idea, I promise. He has a big car and he wanted to give it a little test drive so he hired a driver and we went slowly slowly up the coast. From Kochi, we stopped in Payannur, a little way up from Kannur, where they have this yearly tradition called theyyam, just in that one small part of Kerala. The community there believes that once a year, the gods come down to earth and possess humans. This is displayed in great performances, fire walking or just dancing, shirtless men in white mundus pounding on temple drums as the deity/human in full make up and costume parades in a small temple courtyard. It’s quite something. The really good stuff is in the middle of the night, like 3 am, but all of us being worn out from the long drive, we caught a relatively tame 9 pm … show? I’m not sure what to call it, because it’s not a performance but it also is? It’s quite a well known season, and if you Google theyyam + Kerala, you’ll find quite a few videos illustrating it. (I’d link to some myself but the internet is being extremely temperamental so I’m not even sure I can send this off as soon as I write it.)

(Have just paused in my typing to order a Squid Butter Garlic. We ordered this in Honavar, at some random bar/restaurant and it was terrible, batter fried with a creamy sauce, but we trust the Goans will give us what we want which is just pan fried calamari in lots of butter with enough garlic to ward off a zillion vampires. Meanwhile I’m also watching the table in front of me, remember I said it was a married couple with their single bachelor friend? I was wrong, the “bachelor friend” has been joined by his wife and two daughters who have run off doing mysterious child things together. I’m watching the new wife hold court, she seems to be telling a very long and involved story which requires her to show the other wife a lot of the facial expressions this other person she’s gossiping about was making. My typing has raised some curious eyebrows but they’re too busy making each other laugh—okay only new wife is the comedian—to look at our anti social table much. Only the waiter who brought me a coil for the mosquitoes has remarked admiringly, “You type so fast.”)

Which reminds me oddly of Chat GPT which also comes up so much more here than it does back in Berlin. I mean sure I have friends in Berlin who use it, but here it’s become sort of the new Google. My parents both use it, and today, sharing our table with two strangers who asked us how we’d discovered the (very hidden away) fish thaali restaurant, I said, “Google maps” laughing, so obvious, but the woman looked pleased with herself and said, “I asked Chat GPT where to find a good fish thaali around here.” Same same but different as they say in these hippie-ish parts of the world. I use Google Maps for EVERYTHING, and usually, because of my meticulous research (I read all the reviews sorted by “newest”) we do pretty well, but in Germany, restaurants are allowed to sue for defamation if they get a one star review and the person can’t prove they ate there, so it’s not all roses there either. I even found our resort through Google Maps, using the search function to look along the beach and then just clicking on the properties. (No, but I also use Reddit when I can, especially to find good restaurants in over touristed cities like Athens or Rome.)

At a little bar we found in Saligaon—also through my Google Maps—there was this TV on playing songs from YouTube and all the videos, I mean ALL the videos were showing AI animation. It was terrible. We couldn’t look away, playing spot the difference like a Where’s Wally book. Only it was kind of hard to always find the AI giveaway, which is scary, right? One of the playlists was showing older stuff and there you could instantly spot the AI but the newer stuff is deceptively realistic. And this on a random YouTube channel called “Retro Songs of Italy” or some such.

(The Squid Butter Garlic has come and gone—it was delicious—and so I open my laptop again. I’m fascinated by Old Wife on the other table, she’s not old but she was sitting there in the beginning. Okay, Original Wife. She’s been smoking cigarettes which surprises me, because she doesn’t look a cigarette smoking type and then I have to confront my own ideas of what I think a cigarette smoking “type” is which leads to me giving me a lecture in my own head. Anyway, she’s not inhaling her cigarette but she’s sitting back and smoking them with great pleasure. She’s had three already since I’ve been sitting here. Not that I’m counting. Not that I’m not rolling my own cigarette right now and raising my hand for another drink. Original Wife probably won’t return to her real life and keep smoking whereas I, a Cigarette Smoking Type if ever there was one, will until I shake it off with great drama again.)

After Payannur we made our way up to Honavar for our second night on the road, stopping on the way at a small town whose name can’t remember but who invented the mutton ghee roast which is this rich, incredibly delicious meat dish that made our fingers smell like ghee for the next few hours. There I had a cigarette even though my father warned me it was a very BJP town and so would not appreciate a grown woman smoking on the road like a slut. I had my phone so I nervously flicked through Instagram while a group of smoking young men stared at me like I had two heads. We had a nice home stay booked by the beach which is very remote and very dry, which is why we had to find a bar two towns away, home of the bad butter garlic squid.

The next day we made our way down (up) to Panjim, which as luck would have it, was also dry, it being election time. Goa too has a BJP government and one of the things they’ve done is try and regulate the mafia-esque taxi unions by creating an app where you can actually book cabs online—very rare for Goa. We got a super grumpy driver the next day taking us across the state for half the price so we booked him and were immediately felled by guilt so tipped him, despite his extreme grumpiness and unwillingness to take us further down the road to our resort leaving us (K mostly) to carry my stuffed strolley suitcase in the heat for some time. The government here, a man who worked in a Panjim coffee shop told us, wants to commercialise all land, including farm and forest, but he said, there have been big protests against that, so it’s not happening… yet. “Maybe Rahul Gandhi will win next year,” he said.

TOMORROW (or the day after that! Or next week!) I’ll tell you about Kochi, my new old Delhi adventures AND my unexpected two days in Helsinki on the way over here. I bet you can’t wait.