Home-made Treats

The Goa Open Arts Festival is for and by the local community

- Peter Griffin

India’s smallest state has a multicultural heritage and a vibrant arts and culture scene that doesn’t disappear between March and October. Goa has, for a while now, been a magnet for creative people who have chosen to do more than buy a getaway house in a gated colony with Delhi-Mumbai-Bengaluru neighbours. There is, in other words, more to the Goa arts scene than the Serendipity Arts Festival, as magnificent and tourist-attracting as that endeavour is.

The much smaller Goa Open Arts Festival is determinedly local, a platform for the state’s residents, those who claim roots going back generations as well as those who have transplanted themselves more recently.