Aunty Maria Around the Clock by V. M. de Malar
Blame Charles Correia. Our much-decorated internationally renowned architect came up with the look of the Cidade de Goa a couple of decades ago, and hotel owners and interior designers all over the state have been ineptly following his cue ever since. He showed that you could add character, well, by adding characters painted on your walls, so now they all paint characters on their walls. He took a modern, intelligently engineered, building and imbued it with Goan feeling via murals and statues and so we have a rash of builders taking modern, completely uninteresting, buildings and trying desperately to shoehorn some character and local flavour by layering on murals, and adding statues, and coming up with all kinds of gimmicks. And so to the ultimate gimmick, in the new avatar of the landmark Fidalgo Hotel in Panjim, which from the outside looks like it wishes to flight over to the rest of its family in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, but inside scrambles to create something local in atmosphere. There's lots to commend in the famous institution's renovation, the hotel remains reasonably priced and professionally staffed and the atmosphere is quite cheery and pleasant. But there are also elements that make it a useful example of what's happening to our tourism industry, a bellweather of what is happening to Goa as a destination, as a host culture, as a symbol and as an idea. You walk into a modern lobby, complete with contemporary requirement of bubbling fountain, with the reception on one side, smiling staff ready at their posts exactly as you'd expect. The main décor is painted tiles, the predictable old azulejos which the Iberians themselves adapted from Moorish decorative traditions. Here's where the uneasiness starts, one prominent panel of tiles depicts a Fidalgo, a Portuguese nobleman, attended by a servile black figure, and another is an unbearably tasteless rip-off of a Mario Miranda image. The former carries overtones of the colonial relationship, an idea of subservient locals catering to every whim of the pampered European, it's an archetype that the tourism industry in Goa loves to promote for obvious reasons. And the Mario rip-off is just like all the others, which advertise everything from beer to the state's own tourism board, a pale and lifeless shadow of the original. You walk to the coffee shop shaking your head, thinking about how badly treated Mario Miranda is by his own people, and sit amidst a whole series of more tile panels. There's a woman depicted in them, a slightly stout and bespectacled, apron-clad, Goan with a worried look on her face. She's executing a whole range of household tasks, there is "Aunty Maria on the Rogddo" and "Aunty Maria ready to serve the coffee," and, very improbably and inappropriately for a coffee-shop, even "Aunty Maria about to serve the wine.' So, you start to get irritated all over again, because no Aunty in Goa opens wine-bottles for the menfolk, let alone serves them, and then you stop short in amazement, because around the corner comes Aunty Maria herself. That's right, go to the Fidalgo coffee shop at any time, because it's open twenty-four hours, and there is an Aunty Maria mixed in with waitresses from Nagaland. It's non-stop, all-day-and-all-night, Aunty Maria. Not content with tastelessly caricaturing a made-up Goan Aunty, the Fidalgo management has gone one step beyond even Charles Correia's fertile imagination, they've created a living and breathing tasteless caricature and set her to work serving mutton chops to bemused tourists. She's wearing the same shoes as the Aunty Maria in the tiled panels, she's got the same checked apron and the same rounded glasses, and the same worried expression, it's a totally surreal experience to watch her dish out chocolate cake and coffee at two in the morning. For, this is what it has come to in Goa in 2006, we're cloning Aunties and faking Mario Miranda paintings in a desperate attempt to imbue faceless, characterless, concrete blocks with something, anything, that feels like Goa. And at the same time, we're readying ourselves to totally submerge the real Goa with these identical featureless, characterless, concrete blocks. Madness? Go ask Aunty Maria what she thinks, she's not going anywhere. (ENDS) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above article appeared in the February 28, 2006, edition of the Herald, Goa
