Can happiness be acquired in 2025?

A quick glimpse of revellers who alight from their domestic flights and enter Goa through its northern airport, the fervour of their purse is palpable because of the proud demeanour they demonstrate while standing next to their designer luggage at the Arrivals Terminal while waiting to be handed over the keys to their Rental SUV. It will not be long before they will be hurtling down the Atal Setu at high speeds only to reach the Mandovi Jetty and hand over the keys to the valet before entering one of the many luxurious offshore casinos where they will be comped to welcome drinks and a one-time use gaming coupon which comes standard while incurring the entry fee.

The news of the Goa Government extending the permissions for casino operations until the year 2027 imposes much consternation upon the generational continuance of this hedonistic revelry where Goa and Goans are perceived as a subservient race ever-ready to enable the culmination of vice.

In fact the historical traditions of the erstwhile Portuguese-occupied Goa were quite the opposite. 

The Portuguese colonial administration, heavily influenced by Catholicism and guided by the Jesuits, sought to suppress practices deemed hedonistic or licentious. Revelry that contradicted Christian morality, such as excessive drinking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity, was discouraged through ecclesiastical control and moral edicts.

Hedonism was viewed as sinful and counterproductive to the goal of creating a "civilised" Christian society in the colonies. The Inquisition in Goa (1560–1812) actively monitored and penalised activities considered morally corrupt or heretical.

However, drawing attention towards the prevailing socio-cultural dynamics would certainly  lead to a more nuanced reality.

The perception that happiness can be imbibed into oneself through a visit to Goa on New Year’s Eve seems like a bubble of imaginative hopefulness.

It could be understood that the anonymity which Goa provides through the institutions of hospitality afford some respite from the judgemental lifestyle that one experiences in their hometown, Goa represents that place where inhibitions no longer rule the cautiousness of action.

But does the law of karma really leave one from atoning for their excesses of desire and one upmanship.

According to Florence Scovel Shinn in her book entitled: The Game of Life and How to Play it (1925):

“Man receives only what he gives. The Game of Life is a game of boomerangs. Man's thoughts, deeds and words, return to him sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.”

The illustration given by Florence in her book: The Game of Life and How to Play it (1925), appears to be relevant even in the present year 2025, even though a century may have elapsed:

In her 1925 book, Shinn’s Illustration elaborates as follows: 

A woman with a strong personal will, wished she owned a house which belonged to an acquaintance, and she often made mental pictures of herself living in the house. In the course of time, the man died and she moved into the house. Several years afterwards, coming into the knowledge of Spiritual Law, she said to me: "Do you think I had anything to do with that man's death?" I replied: "Yes, your desire was so strong, everything made way for it, but you paid your karmic debt. Your husband, whom you loved devotedly, died soon after, and the house was a white elephant in your hands for years."

The original owner, however, could not have been affected by her thoughts had he been positive in the truth, nor her husband, but they were both under karmic law. The woman should have said (feeling the great desire for the house), "Infinite Intelligence, give me the right house, equally as charming as this, the house which is mine by divine right."

Similar to the descriptive illustration elaborated by Florence Scovel Shinn (1925), the pursuit of peace in Goan neighborhoods appears to be a far cry from desirable outcomes.

Take for instance the reality of a lonely 80-year-old neighbour and his wife, who spend most of their retired life living alone despite having brought up two sons and a daughter by educating them into socially servient professions. The elderly couple spend their days in loneliness despite yearning for the closeness of their sons. 

As a compensatory mechanism, in order to outwardly express the frustration over their intermittent loneliness, the elderly couple find it appropriate to engage the slipshod and crude services of handymen and housemaids who hail from the underprivileged strata of society. 

All this engagement by the elderly couple was done only to express their existence vicariously in the thoughts of their peace-loving neighbours. A kind of declaration that even though they may be in the final quarter of their life, they still constitute enough spunk to cause discomfort in the lives of their neighbours through the ignorant acts of their uneducated workers. A final effort of self-determination because their own offspring couldn’t actively acknowledge the presence of their elderly parents in the social strata of their migrant country -- the leaving behind of responsibility.

In a situation such as the one described above, the quest for happiness tries to evade the laws of karma but fate has a very cruel way of catching up with the misdeeds of the past and a mere turn of the pages of the calendar may merely be symbolic but the holistic atonement for maintaining one’s desires is a book of truth that is eternal.