Lies, half truths and the art of convincing

Met Gemmon (sic) after many years. Gemmon was a boy who lived in front of our dept. in Art College. He used to come to our dept. to chat with a girl studying painting. I know him since he was about 7. Now he looks like any normal adult. He told me that one of our mutual friends had become an alcoholic. Sad, I thought. One other thing he told me was that he owned a yacht, "that white one is mine" he said, pointing to one stately yacht. Wow!, I thought. I had no grounds on which to disbelieve Gemmon. Goans have sold Goa bit by bit and have become hugely rich. And a crazy kid like Gemmon, who smoked charas in school, might as well have sold land or hash to the hoards and made bucks. Why not? I believed him despite his appearance: He was in his usual flip-flops, loose shirt and dirty jeans. Common sense should have told me that yacht owners do not dress like deck-hands. Next I met someone who knew Gemmon and I told him that Gemmon had bought a yacht. I also told him of the other thing Gemmon had told me. This chap told me that Gemmon worked at a restaurant and that he still smoked dope. He told me Gemmon was a compulsive liar. later I met the chap who was reportedly an alcoholic. He is not. He sells marble to builders. Sandeep is another c.l. He was a teacher in a school. He apparently was fired due to heavy drinking. He lies through his teeth. I needed a rental room for reasonable price so I asked him whether he knew of any. He phoned someone right there and I actually heard him say things like "my bungalow in old Goa", etc. Needless to say that nothing materialised out of that conversation except that we learned that some tap was leaking and so the entire O.H. tank did not have water in it. i have not questioned the veracity of it; I know it is a lie. Yesterday I went out with my friends to cabala (?) in Baga. There we met a group of friends. One among them was a young lawyer from Delhi., who was talking the most and he was talking senselessly. Actually he was on and on about my friend's hairy backside etc. I was beginning to get irritated. I told him that it was more like he was fascinated about hairy backs although he was criticising it, etc. so he stopped his hairy back refrain and listened to others' talk. I was listening too. Mostly the talk was lies flying in that generally inebriated field of possibilities. They seemed so impervious to it that they actually carried on conversation without betting an eyelid. The gullible me got sucked into the conversation though I did not talk. I was new to the place; I had no reference to things. Every time someone left, the others present there would remark on how that person was a 'total con', etc. Sometime later my friend began talking to someone about my art and how good an artist I was etc. That is when I came to know that in that small world the big thing was to say something profoundly sensational. If you did not have anything profound, you were ignored till it hurt. I had nothing to say. I just made polite conversation and gradually began to be ignored. It did not hurt me. I am wondering whether that was the - sample of the general tendency among Goans to fib. People fib casually. They do not stop to verify whether the lie was 'taken in' or the listener just put on an act of listening. I see it happening all the time. Police lie and lawyers lie, sub-registrars and judges lie. Polititians and bureaucrats lie. Lying is an art that is being fine tuned in Goa. I hope I am wrong, for if I am right, they will live in an altered reality where one is convinced about something that is not a fact as being real. When money making is the sole thing that matters, what values are we talking about? It will be so easy to believe yourself that a woman is a cow and sell her in a cattle market, if this becomes a habit. The thought scares me.