Crime stings beach paradise. Travel agents across the country are expecting a fall in the number of Russian tourists to Goa… 915 words. Click here.

I've come to realise two things this week; that the UK is a country of people wearing the ugliest shoes in the world and that I am plagued. I am plagued by doubt; about who I am, about my identity as a human being.

My parents never had any doubts about their identity. No matter where they were in the world, they were Goan. Their world was defined entirely by the morality of their Catholic faith, by the world-view which germinated in the villages that they were born in and grew up in. Their friendships were defined by a commonality of culture and race. Their friends looked like themselves; brown, they thought like them, spoke like them, had similar values like themselves. Their diet of rice and fish curry was defined by the accidents of Goa's geography which poured forth its regional abundance. They were a thoroughly homogenized group. I on the other hand, am adrift. In my own world I have to undertake the arduous journey of finding an identity. It isn't etched in stone as it was for my parents and their parents before them.

I was born in Ribandar, Goa, in a hospital alongside the picturesque river Mandovi and yet I had no connection to Ribandar other than the fact that my mother worked there as a nurse. For the next 28 odd years of my life, I lived in Dubai, in a world of desert-shamals, a relentless wind which sweeps the grainy sand off the dunes and scatters its like a dervish; endless days without rain to quench the thirst of the earth; women who covered themselves up to hide their faces and men who prostrated themselves 5 times a day in earnest supplication to God, the body and will bent in the safe knowledge that Allah would provide. This was a world very different from the one my parents grew up in and it created an entirely different mindset.

From the wilderness of the Middle Eastern desert in which countless Muslim, Christian and Judaic prophets had roamed to find themselves, I left for the bitter cold of Minnesota in America; a bastion of liberal mindedness. From my window, all I could see for six months of the year was fairy-white snow clinging to the barren out-stretched arms of trees that had died and were waiting to be resurrected by the arrival of spring. Here my Goan identity dissipated like a tablet in a glass of water. No one knew where Goa was, no one cared to find out. It was as if I had stopped being and yet I was coming alive in discovering myself. I was being resurrected by my own arrival of a personal spring. As I lustily embraced every liberal-minded platform which America espouses, I couldn't help wondering if I was becoming American. What after all defines us, gives us identity besides the values we hold dear?

We live in a culturally dissipated world. Our diet is anything the supermarket retailer can source from the corners of the world and stock. Our language is English. Our thoughts and ideas can be influenced by events that take place in countries we have only visited through television. Our music is what we can download on an iPod. These are different times and our culture is bound to undergo a transformation. We can build on a foundation laid for us but we cannot be dormant and stagnant. Which brings us to the question, what shapes a collective identity in this dissipated world? Could it be that in the minutiae of our lives, the larger threads of culture are being woven together? Could it be that our identity is being carved in the mundanity of everyday decisions, such as whether to be civically responsible, drive carefully, be generous of spirit, believe in the equality of human beings, the rights of women and respect for other people's tradition. How does each generation of Goans find the answer to these questions? By searching our hearts for the answers, by raising the level of public and private debate, by letting our conscience guide us instead of empty rhetoric.

For what is culture and its larger constituent identity, when it has been stripped bare of all the baubles of food, music and national costume? What is it other than the inhaling and exhaling of a collective morality?

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