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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Can an outsider ever truly belong in Goa? New book grapples with this question

Is everyone 'doing Goa' wrong? Each wave of migrants has a different answer

Everyone who comes to Goa is hungry for something.

You are a young tourist, looking for release, a chance to shake out your weary bones before the city’s hustle reclaims you. Or you are a middle-aged city-slicker heeding Goa’s siren call to take the reek of dodginess off your funds, in the form of a third home with minimal days on Airbnb. Or you are a corporate lifer who has had enough of our maximum cities, seeking a quiet place to raise your kids and maybe dabble in a cafe or two.

Seeking, desiring, hunkering, hunting. Appetite, a new anthology of 36 stories, poems, essays—and even a graphic piece—is interested in capturing what happens to a place when everyone’s busy wanting it.

Published by Penguin Random House earlier this year and edited by Shivranjana Rathore and Tino de Sa, the collection brings together original pieces from members of the Goa Writers Group, a community of over a hundred writers based in the state or connected to it by ancestry. The contributors span generations, from Jnanpith Award-winner Damodar Mauzo and 100-year old American writer and journalist Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, the oldest member of the group, to emerging voices publishing for the first time.

Despite the title’s straightforward suggestion, not a single entry is about food. The appetite that the anthology is interested in is for Goa itself: For its land, for belonging, for reinvention, and for desire.

Also read: Goa residents are anxious about Dabolim airport shutdown talk. It’s a lifeline

Two of the collection’s entries that address this directly work as companion pieces. Seema Mustafa’s essay “The Wannabe Colonizers or Some Such” is a personal account of moving to Goa from Delhi. Mustafa at first wrestles with, and later, slowly comes to terms with the idea of being an outsider: That Goans have very specific reasons for disliking what people like her represent, and that those reasons have nothing to do with her personally.

Mustafa, a veteran journalist who has covered conflict zones, writes about deploying those same instincts in her adopted state, chatting up everyone from the shopkeeper........

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