Goa has got to be one of the most lawless corners of the earth. Not lawless because you are likely to be attacked while walking down the street or mugged while withdrawing from a cash machine but lawless because should you be the victim of a crime, you can be assured of just one thing - that the law will be against you.

If you happen to be the victim of an orchestrated attack by a right-wing, fundamentalist group, the group will have a "patient hearing" with the polity of Goa, and Goan citizens will be asked to understand religious sensibilities. How many times in the past year, 2009, has our right to freedom and expression been assaulted by these groups who insisted that certain documentaries not be shown at film festivals or that certain pictures by M F Husain be withdrawn from public viewing or that liberal, artistic representations of Ganesha were offensive to them or even playful T-shirts caused grave insult to them? In almost every case of this violation of fundamental democratic rights, it was the right-wing groups that got the upper hand.

But of course in the past year we learnt that being a woman victim in Goa was a particularly difficult situation. When a certain man called Mohanand Naik was found to be a serial killer who had in fact over a period of 15 years, strangulated young girls with their dupattas, luring them with promises of marriage, Ravi Naik, Goa's Home Minister told us that women should not go out wearing dupattas. Later in the year when a young Russian woman alleged rape, the police had not even bothered interviewing the accused even though they had every opportunity to do so. Unfortunately Digambar Kamat, Goa's Chief Minister and later Shantaram Naik MP, thought that girls who stayed out late in the night with men were inviting trouble and that a value judgment had to be made in order to properly assess such cases. Bravo!! We Goans have effectively put the cause of women back by about 100 years. I wouldn't be at all surprised if next we call upon all women with cats to be burnt at the stake as possible witches.

Shantaram Naik went on television and told us that a sort of "cultural aggression" is foisted on Goa by foreign Western tourists. I'm not sure what he meant by cultural aggression. It seems naïve Goan men are being given mixed signals by White women and our poor boys are unable to interpret these signals. But thousands of Goans live in Western countries who have yet to be culturally aggressed upon. Goan men living and working alongside Western women in Dubai, UK or Canada don't seem to get their signals mixed up. Shantaram and Digamber Kamat should know, the language of sexuality is universal. It needs no interpreters. A no is a no in any culture.

As if all this wasn't enough, the year ended with a mob of Catholics from the coastal fishing village of South Goa, going on a rampage, attacking the house of a certain man who allegedly made a CD tape defaming the local parish priest. Perhaps we Goans have yet to learn what democracy really is, that it entails patience, tolerance and respect of other people's freedom no matter how much we'd like to trample on them. What we have in Goa is not cultural aggression by outsiders but blatant dadagiri by us Goans. Nobody in Goa respects the law because the law doesn't respect itself. We see people as extensions of mosques or church spires, as demons or beatified, as causes to be vilified or avenged, as news items to be read about.

As a society we Goans are denuded of the Self. We are void of those qualities that in centuries past have driven our society forward; calm introspection and corrective action. We are mortally wounded by the least amount of criticism. We have drowned ourselves in the superficial noise of celebrating parties, weddings and anniversaries. Our only conversations revolve around which band is playing and where to find the best caterers. Other than that we've got nothing. We are bankrupt of philosophy, innovation and intellectual output. We are in torrid and shameful embrace only of our egos. We keep blaming our politicians but politicians are a representation of the society we have become. So for 2010, my fellow Goans, I wish our society just one gift. The gift of gut-wrenching collective self-examination.