Frederick Noronha takes us back to hippie days in Anjuna
GOA TODAY, November 1996
Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India
by Cleo Odzer
Blue Moon Books
DID you wonder how the hippies of the ’70s managed to live seemingly luxurious lives in Goa without doing a day’s work? Want to know how they spent months on a tiny stretch of Anjuna beach? Or what really attracted them to Goa?
If so, this is the book. It is a must-read for the student of sociology, the Goan from the coastal belt, and about anyone curious to understand the changes this society underwent in the last three decades.
Cleo Odzer is herself a former hippie, reincarnated as a respectable academic in the US. She tells the full story, with brutal and uncensored honesty. Even at the risk of portraying herself as a narcissistic, self-centered and a law-breaking guest of Goa.
This book’s significance is that it is the first to decode the lives and times of the hippies of Goa, which was one of the hippie-capitals worldwide (besides Ibiza in Spain and Kathmandu).
Odzer grew up in the lap of Jewish affluence in New York, as a disaffected youth in the post-Vietnam War generation. She opted to restlessly comb Europe and the Middle East before taking the overland bus from Europe to Goa. Four years — of drugs, depravity and a meaningless existence — was, however, more than she could take of it. Continue reading
