GOA is, quite literally, on the make. From the moment you alight at Dabolim airport, overjoyed to be back in the land of seamless pleasures, a construction frenzy accosts you. The arrival and departure area outside the airport seems to be in the same gravel and dust mess that you recall from last year. And as you drive into the countryside, the blots on the landscape multiply as developers, much after the fashion of suburban Delhi, plant signboards threatening hotels and condominiums. Along the leafy winding roads, concrete husks, often strapped in with scaffolding, now jostle for space with leaning palms. Clearly, not only do more people visit Goa, but increasing numbers want a permanent slice of it—a small flat, a patch of land. Understandable since paradise is not to be scoffed at. But the road to paradise remains rocky. The bus journeys take too long, the ferry service from Bombay is defunct, the airport is like the New Delhi railway station at peak hour, and the Konkan railway is a ghostly apparition, the arches of its bridges running in gentle humps then dropping a few spans and carrying on.
