Whenever I take the rare run at the beach back home I pass through a part of Tithal unvisited by most tourists who come visit and remains ignored even by the local visitors from town. This part of the beach is not a secret or anything but it lies beyond a border surprisingly no one seems to want to come across. This other beach is actually adjoined to village roads and fishermen’s houses, the governance not under town municipality. Even the tourism development budgets for the beach do not leak across this virtual border for some reason.

When you step onto the beach through the main town road and start walking north and keep walking, going beyond the Swaminarayan temple on the coast you will find a diaphanous curtain of commercialism drop off and you will find yourself at the beach as it was twenty years ago frozen in time. The village boys and girls play cricket and football here with tennis-balls and basketballs respectively. The parents fish the waters and when they pull themselves along with their nets to the coast the kids run after them in the water hoping to catch a glimpse of the catch. It is mostly dead jellyfish and broken damp wood with the occasional shrimp or shoe nowadays.

I am severely out of breath, energy and bathed in sweat as I am running across this village beach and observing all of this silently wondering if this community is not similar to the one in Goa many decades ago when white people first recognized it as their utopian bohemia and shed their clothes there. Sure this beach and its surroundings are less beautiful but I wonder what would require to make this place, this town an attraction for bohemianism and open to various ideas and more liberal sexuality of all. Of-course it had much more to it than just the beach, but rather much more to do with what was happening further inland, the social garment, culture, acceptance to new ideas, fundamentalism, religion, tribalism and the rest. Further discussion soon.

See you tomorrow,
Avi.

P.S. Here is a picture of a washed-up jellyfish on the shore.