https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/The-Changing-Faces-of-Brand-Goa/216490
Michelle Mendonça Bambawale’s charming and unique book launch in Siolim last week was an interesting illustration of the newly charged and changed-up post-pandemic cultural landscape of Goa. The event unfolded at sunset under coconut palms in the garden of the author’s creatively reconfigured 160-year home that was originally built by her great-great-grandfather - where she has swapped out the balcão for a Thai pergola – and was the first fully-scripted book discussion I’ve ever attended, with vivacious back-and-forth Q&A-style dialogue from her husband Bharat (an expert in marketing), 32-year-old son Kunal (a product and marketing executive) and 28-year-old daughter Divya, who is an elementary school teacher in San Francisco. Bambawale’s literary debut – and indeed her ample Goa life as evidenced by the enthusiastic crowds at her launch – is itself part of the pandemic fallout in India’s smallest state. She explains in* Becoming Goan: A contemporary coming-home story *– the first chapter is aptly entitled *Who Am I? A Real Goan or a Pandemic Migrant?* that “it was Covid-19 that propelled the four of us and our Labrador, Haruki, to relocate to Goa in June 2020. I was looking to find safety in a place my grandparents had left…had always had a complicated relationship with my Goan lineage. I had never lived in Goa full-time and I did not speak Konkani. I knew little of this land, its many histories and mysteries, and was the clichéd global citizen.” As lockdown extended, “the Covid-19 timeout allowed me to reflect on my Goan identity. I felt that it was time to write my reflections on this lived paradox – a look at Goa from the outside, as well as a journey of discovery.” Bambawale says “after eighteen years of living as an expat and looking in from the outside of the host country, I now find myself in a strange position living in Goa. I wonder if I am an insider, given my Goan heritage. As an expat, you know your stay is temporary and that you are always an outsider. I now find myself torn between two worlds – the Goan and the outsider, but I don’t belong in either. I guess we all suffer from some incarnation of the impostor syndrome. Turbulent Covid-19 times made me question – Is the pursuit of happiness to find love, home, family and safety? Is home a place or a people?” These are highly relatable questions explored with guileless sincerity, and Bambawale’s book slots alongside *Glad Seasons in Goa* (1994) by the late, great adman Frank Simoes, and Katarina Kakar’s excellent 2013 *Moving to Goa*, both of which traced identical journeys of understanding, and putting down new roots in Goa. The big difference between them is timing. Back in the late 1980s when Simoes moved from Bombay to live in still-pristine Candolim, his friends thought he had lost it, and the eccentricity would soon pass, but *Becoming Goan* emerges into an era bristling with unlimited hordes of Indian elites with Goa aspirations (almost all of which exclude the pesky, inconvenient Goans themselves). Unavoidably, it was that precipitous journey from blissful “backwater” obscurity to half-destroyed playground for the world’s worst tourists that kept playing in my mind as dusk fell over the launch at Siolim. The thought occurred: what would marketing experts say about Goa’s transformed and still-shifting brand identity? Given that Bharat Bambawale was already in my line of sight, after decades of high-level experience in international marketing communications, including a stint as Airtel’s first and only global brand director, I ventured to ask this acclaimed consultant, whose own debut *Nine Timeless Nuggets: Essential Marketing for the Young and Ambitious* was published by Penguin in 2020, and was immediately impressed by his perceptive analysis: “Goa has always possessed a certain magnetism to people all over the world which has always been disproportionate to and much larger than its actual place in the economy. The exchange between visitor and host was benign. The influx of outsiders was culturally and physically non-invasive and non-corrosive. Both sides were rewarded - the host Goan with (modest) financial gains and the visitor with relaxation and tranquillity. Both sides wished to maintain the status quo, and indeed did. Were there other desti-nations in India that mirrored some if not all of Goa’s physical features? Of course there were, some with similar or arguably better features. But none could come even close to Goa in one remarkable way: how it made people feel. Goa made people feel a certain way – and still does. This touches a very im-portant aspect of branding and brand soft power - brands are not just about what they do functionally, they are crucially about how they make people feel. Goa made people feel happy, relaxed and rejuvenated in a manner few, if any, other places in India did.” In marketing terms, all this is pure magic. Bambawale says the “customer experience” was “overwhelmingly satisfying and elevating” and the “value equation” was “massively positive” which resulted in legions of “brand devotees” and made Goa’s “brand positioning” largely unassailable. But then came the fall as “the world has changed. India has changed. And, inevitably, Goa has changed. Now we have luxury hotels, casinos, high-end restaurants and bars, EDM con-certs, modern airports, wealthy homes, expensive cars, six-lane intercity mo-torways and malls. What impact has this had on the Brand Goa of fifty years earlier? The target audience has shifted to another kind of person: newly affluent and tending to the brash, loud spoken and rough-mannered. They come from parts of India where society imposes stricter rules on public behaviour and of-fices and careers that also demand a certain conformity. They too come to Goa to escape their daily lives, but for different reasons than their predecessors over the past decades.” What we are living through is an ugly and destructive race to the bottom, as Bambawale says “the actual experiential interactions between brand and customer where deep impressions are indelibly etched are not as positive as they once were. What were previously mostly “Moments of Magic” are now increasingly coloured by “Moments of Misery”. There are terrible traffic jams, taxi fares remain high, there is garbage on the streets, there are construction projects everywhere and Goa is beginning to feel closed in. The essential character and charm that made Goa what it was is now considerably less evident, and many long-time visitors remark how this is not the place they used to know and love. The same people who used to be “brand devotees” are becoming “brand detractors” which is not a good sign, as the customer experience of Goa isn’t anywhere as positive as it used to be.” This stark decline is explored in* Becoming Goan* too, where the Epilogue aches with real feeling: “I wonder if one day in the future, Goans will be like the in-digenous population in the New World whom we visit through museums and cultural experiences. I think about the original inhabitants of lands who have been colonized – Gawdas and Kunbis, Aboriginals, Maoris and the native Americans/Canadians – whose reservations you visit, food you taste, and cus-toms and dances you watch, as a tourist looking for some local history and cul-ture. I can see the possible future – the voyeuristic viewing of grand old Goan houses [and] Goans singing and playing fados, mandos and dulpods [along with] cooking Goan delicacies to entertain tourists who want to know what Goan living was.”