Posts with tag India

Maja’s day starts early, at around nine o’clock in the morning and continues until late evening. She walks up and down the beach, trying to sell her things. She is one of several vendours doing the beach-walk in Palolem, India, everyday. “Do you remember me?” is a common opening question. “Would you like to see my things?” and “Very cheap!” Everything is sold; pirate copies of movies and music, bracelets and necklaces, stickers, beach doties, do Henna, manicure, pedicure, pinapple and coconut and much more. Many, as Maja, come from Rajasthan and travel in the beginning of each season  on the three-day trainjourney to Goa where the tourists are. They stay 6-8 months away from family and friends to earn an income and then go back.

Tourism is the prime industry in Goa, handling, according to wikipedia, 12% of all tourist arrivals in India. In 2004, there were more than 2 million tourists reported to have visited Goa, 400.000 were from abroad. The goal of 2020 is, says today’s Goan issue of The Times of India, to improve infrastructure such as roads and carparks, but also to change focus from only sun and beaches to promote the local agriculture, food and culture. A necessary thing, if, as said in the article, Goa want to be able to compete with other tourist attractions in the world such as Thailand and Malaysia. But with tourism travels problems such as drugs and prostitution, and worries are put forward that a whole genereation of Goan youngsters are lost in drug trafficking.

The pros and cons of tourism has been put forward in the local papers the last two weeks, very much triggered of a story of a young Russian girl being raped in Goa by a policeman. The story was lifted in the papers with the headline: “Is Goa safe for tourists?”. Today’s paper pose a retoric question: “But are Goans safe from tourism?”

New job opportunities are created and formed. The old one changes. The young man at the bar in Palolem used to as a kid run around an almost empty beach, where the only industry was fishermen. Now he works at one of the popluar hang-outs at the beach. And Maja, 37 years old with most of her family left in Jaipur, Rajasthan, has during the past five years done the journey to reach the tourists and business opportunity. How many foreign workers that reach Goa each season to work is hard to find an exact figure of.

How do deal with tourism is a delicate question. An interesting reflection of African cultural production and what attracts the global cultural entrepreneurs is written by Francis B Nyamjoh, Head of Publications and Dissemination in Sengegal, in “Cultures and Globalization: The Cultural Economy”. Somehow relevant in Goa.

In Sånga-Säby, a small village on the countryside outside Stockholm, around eighty participants from cultural life gathered to discuss local initiatives meeting global influences. Two full and intense days on May 20-21 with experiences of how to make change happen, the challenges of renewal, living the network, leadership and plenty of examples of local intiatives. One of the glimmering moments were when Rasoul Nejadmehr, Multicultural Consultant from the Region of Västra Götaland, told a good-night story. It was the real story of his life as a nomad, born somewhere in the borders around Afghanistan to his today life in Sweden. “The grass is always greener somewhere else”, he said when reflecting on his childhood. A nomad is always looking for greener grass and a better spot. It’s always somewhere else, it’s always changing. A woman in the audience made the reflection that in the Swedish farming land, you stick with your land and it’s a sign of discontent or envy to look for where the “grass is greener”. Two opposite perspectives on life.

Global influences came from organisations like Raqs Media Collective and Sarai from New Dehli, British Council in London and Labforculture in Amsterdam. We listened to the experiences of Intercult and Swedish Travelling Exhibitions. The Artist Jörgen Svensson talked about his project Public Safety and the artistic work he did in Stavanger, the Cultural Capital of 2008. The work in Stavanger includes a website for confessions, found at www.skriftestol.se.

Have a look at the programme: sanga-saby_programme.pdf. The seminar was arranged by The Foundation for the Future of Culture.

Nätverkstan arranged last year a conference in cooperation with the network Encatc under the topic “On Entrepreneurship and Education in Cultural Life” which very well relate to the same topic as this one. The documentation is possible to download here or from Encatc or Nätverkstan webpages. Nätverkstans contribution to this seminar is found in the following pdf culturalleader08.pdf.