An anniversary edition you have been eagerly waiting for, right?

Right!

You might be wondering, why is the word Anniversary chosen in the first place? Has India experienced a recurring event which needs to be celebrated? Maybe it has, but the reason to name it this way is to celebrate the first anniversary of my website.

Very, very exciting indeed! Cannot imagine what it was like a year back. 🎉 It feels extremely befitting to write a post on India in India.

What goes around, comes around.

Let’s cut short the philosophical backstory and get forward from where we left off previously.

Goa - Every student’s unfulfilled adventure

Oh yes. I felt just like you, my Indian reader. Goa was a far-fetched dream for me until I made it there. To my readers from other nationalities, an analogical location is ideally where the generation before you, didn’t want you to visit. If you are one such person, who visited a place despite a strong opposition from the previous generation, here is a cookie to you 🍪.

But if you haven’t been able to, here is a dark chocolate for you 🍫.

The dark chocolate is to downsize the dopamine shot you would get by reading my account. Goa is a land of dopamine shots overloaded. Of course, there are others who go exclusively to take other shots, but we were already uplifted by the natural beauty there to a higher state of mind.

We made our pilgrimage plans to Goa well before our graduation. To be precise, we made it there 3 years after we first planned. I did something which had a snowball effect leading to our Goa trip. I just booked the tickets and asked my group to join in. And surprisingly almost everyone turned up!

We landed in Goa and realized the first flaw in our plan. It’s pretty inceptive by the way. Yes, you are a smart one, we didn’t have a plan in the first place! Here we were, walking away from the Airport in the off-peak season (April), towards what could likely be a bus stop (you never know until you see one).

Pro tip to all frugal travelers like us: never book a cab from Goa Airport. They will reap you clean of all the budget you had planned . But Pro Pro tip: have a basic plan of line of action. The following four days were one of the best days of our lives. We switched living spaces every day, rented a car and drove based on our intuition and actually survived (well, who would have guessed!).

We drove even after the sun went down, watched the fishes waddling close to us deep water and sat by the beach like it was the last day of our lives.

Despite travelling on a budget, we went to one of the best casinos in India (not technically in India), shared some exotic meals and danced our heart out while the music reverberated with our soul.

Coming to think of it, I did something in Goa that I have never done in my life and probably never will. I gambled a minimum denomination of money in a casino which resided inside an anchored ship.

Wanna take a guess on what game I played?

No, it wasn’t Blackjack where the probability of chances were low or any other game where a simple mathematical intuition can convince you otherwise. I played the roulette, once. I bet on red colour which had a 50% probability of winning. And, I won the money I bet. I earned back my entry fee. That was good enough for me. 🥳

For the rest six hours, apart from the time we spent at a food counter to shamelessly devour what seemed like an infinite set of edible food. I sat and observed how effectively the casino was running its business. I stood and observed every game and understood how they were designed to trigger basic human emotions and was backed by psychology of money. It was very interesting exercise to say the least. I highly recommend this exercise to every one of you.

Only when I gambled, was I able to understand why it never appealed to me. . As many might know, one isn’t allowed to use their phone to take pictures within the premises of several casinos. And there wasn’t a single clock to indicate time.

They essentially want to make sure you have no levity to cheat nor hold a collective conscious of time trickling away.

Smart move by the staff, but my friend was smarter! He managed to click a snap of the poker chips which I have attached for you to see. I cannot go into the exact details the level of disgust I felt when money made people lose their minds but that is a story for another time. There was so much I learned within the extent of this casino, but I will shift gears to another interesting story

You will be surprised to know what we managed to do on our very first day. We rented a boat for half the price (thanks to the insane negotiation skills developed by my MBA friends) and went down under to snorkel. To be fair, it wasn’t snorkelling, but rather deep water diving, let’s just keep it between us. You may recollect from my post on “Escapism that I had a dripping fear when entering deep water.

But, I went for it all and managed to stay the longest under water. Pretty significant achievement that I am very very proud of. After which we did skin dipping (well yes, but actually no) along the shore before heading back to grab some Goan cuisine.

Let me warn you first. Goan cuisine is different. It has an immense Portuguese (Ola!) influence while partly blending it with south Indian cooking. Vegetarian options are fairly limited. I am sure seafood options were great, but vegetarian Goan cuisine wasn’t to my liking unfortunately. None of them stuck out to me or had a lasting impression. We switched cuisines the other day and went to a Hippie’s place.

Of course, none of us looked like a Hippie. Does that make us non-Hippie Hippie as we were fairly distinctive to those who were present there? I will let you answer that for yourselves. The décor and arrangement had such a calming effect on us. We felt very astute, composed and other-worldly as we settled down. I had arguably one of the best mocktails that I had ever had, here. I don’t recollect exactly what I had but it sure was heavenly. The whole setup had such a relaxing vibe. After having such a transformative change, we did what you would expect us to do. We headed to a club to dance our heart out. Plot twist: Only we couldn’t enter it.

Seven stags allowed to enter a club is extremely unorthodox and a very deadly sin in our country. We did what was the most logical next step. We started hunting down this alley for a sports bar. To our dismay, there wasn’t a single sports bar! Finally, a bouncer had some sympathy for us and let us in during the “Happy hours” (not to mention a bribe we had to pay to gain that sympathy).

For folks who don’t know what “Happy Hours” denotes, it’s simple. I am going to explain it to you like you are five years old (that’s how my friends explained it to me). During these hours, the prices are slashed to half and it is meant to cater to the heaviest of the drinkers. Here is a problem. Non-alcoholic drinks were priced at the same rate. It was basically an unhappy set of hours for non-alcoholics like me. But the important thing is that we had fun playing billiards and dancing to random music by a very ill trained DJ.

I vividly remember the night before we had to catch our flights to get back to our home cities. We just stood ashore and reflected at the excitement we felt for the past four days. Every one of us knew that we wouldn’t be able to experience anything remotely close to that for a very long time to come.

We stood there, immersing ourselves to the sound of waves rhythmically striking the shores. Not a word was uttered between us.

And our fears turned out to be true. We weren’t able to plan a reunion until now.

to be continued….

I will conclude this series with my enchanting travel to Kanyakumari along with my family. Due to my work commitments, I wasn’t able to complete this series as planned.

I thank Rishabh wholeheartedly for gifting me the following book and celebrating this anniversary with me. He is the one of the best to work with, and I am so grateful to have found him. Of course, this wouldn’t have been possible without Soundarya, who introduced me to Rishabh.

I include a witty remark or a bonus section along with my post in my newsletter. You should consider signing up for free, if you enjoy reading less boring emails. I only deliver once a month, and no spammy mails whatsoever.

Subscribe now