Atithi Devo Bhavah????

The Goa debate seems to be moving away from the basic fact that Scarlett Keeling has been murdered. There is no way you can wish away the body and the report of the medical examination, which says that the teenager was raped before being killed. There is neither any evidence to link this murder to the beach resort's drug trade. Keeling's possible involvement with narcotic substance offenders and their clandestine business has nothing to do with the savagery inflicted upon her. In the end, it was more a crime of lust.

Let us not be led astray by the ongoing debate in Britain that Scarlett might have been the promiscuous daughter of a bohemian mother who lives life according to her own hippie norms. We have no right to sit on judgment on Fiona Mackowen especially when it makes us digress from the real issue in hand. The perpetrators of the heinous murder desired the fifteen-year-old because they had assumed she was unchaste and, therefore, sexually available. Probably, the motive was that if her boyfriend Julio Lobo could enjoy her physical company, why should others be deprived of Scarlett's feminine bounty.

This is the larger question which petty souls like home minister Ravi Naik don't want to answer. Goa has long been an international tourist destination but has still not been able to reconcile itself to either bohemianism or promiscuity. Goa's burgeoning hospitality trade can entice affluent customers with marijuana and barbiturates or even with expensive brown sugar. But when it comes to sensitivity to apparently deviant behaviour, even the average Goan with his long experience of hosting foreigners gropes in the dark. It is easy for the shack-owners in Anjuna or Baga beaches to use Caucasian white females, especially those from East European countries, as drug conduits or call girls. It is difficult for them to relate to their unpredictable nature, mood swings, their sexual candour with a few and refusal to sleep with the others.

Why blame Goa when Indian prudery has always misconstrued promiscuity as an invitation or a willingness to be an easy sexual prey? Scarlett's confused adolescent soul comes through in the pages of her diary. Neither she nor her mother is the epitome of immorality which the Indian establishment would rather have us believe. The family definitely subscribes to an experimental lifestyle but that doesn't mean they forego their individual right to choose their own partners. Being the daughter of a mother who has married five times does not automatically mean that the 15-year-old girl is obvious game for the male predator.

But such simplistic assumptions overpower the Indian subconscious. The maladjusted and the deviant are necessarily bad. We make moral inferences based on our own insular comprehension of life as we experience it within the boundaries of the subcontinent. That explains why tourists are sexually attacked so frequently in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and even Maharashtra. That explains why the absconding Biti Mohanty misreads a German acquaintance's apparent proximity as sexual consent. Our own repressed perspectives get entwined with our coloured views of Western customs and habits. The end result is a heinous crime like rape.

We have no idea that while we may still consider words like freethinker or libertine derogatory in nature but a forgiving West has long moved on and accepted nonconformists like hippies, cultists, beatniks, New Agers, commune inhabitants and flower children as part of the mainstream. What we deride as promiscuity is not looked down upon in the same way either in North America or Europe. To them, unabashed fulfillment of biological needs does not necessarily imply that a woman can be dismissed as a whore. Our xenophobic tendencies prevent us from rightly interpreting changing sexual mores in nations abroad.

Scarlett Keeling has been made to pay a heavy price not for her mother's past sins or recklessness in leaving her alone in a strange paradise. She has died because we aren't liberal enough, nor are we willing to change ourselves. Great tourist destinations are accommodative of global perceptions. We have miles to go before we acquire a transnational sensibility. Even a tiny Mauritius or Maldives has a broader perception of international tourist behaviour. Thailand is leagues ahead. So is China.

Keeling's death nailed a great lie that we try to perpetuate. Indians may flatter themselves into believing they are generous hosts but they actually aren't. The much-touted principle of Athithi devo bhava applies only to domestic tourists, not to eccentric foreigners. Otherwise, Japanese tourists would not have complained of being harassed by a guide at the Sun Temple in Konark. Otherwise non-resident Indians would not have felt like running away from the clutches of greedy pujaris at Kalighat in Kolkata.

Tourism is about opening up your own culture with due tolerance and utmost respect for the culture of the visitors. Indians are too immersed in their medieval ethos to understand the worldwide cultural crosscurrents of the twenty-first century. There's an old Chinese adage that says a closed mind is like a closed book, just a block of wood. We are indeed the wooden people.