150 days of drum circles, art, music and saving Goa’s beaches

On Sunday evening, locals and tourists came together on Baga beach for a special clean-up drive – the #TeraMeraBeach campaign – one that involved a jam session using instruments made out of waste material, and a unique ‘Waste Bar’, where the beach-goers could trade in waste, including straws, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, bottle caps and paper, for beverages and sun-downers.By the end of the day, they managed to collect a total of 2,500 cigarette butts and 1,500 bottle caps.
This marked the last day of the 150-day clean-up campaign that aimed to make visitors responsible and aware of the necessity of using bins along the beach, segregating waste and participating in beach clean-up drives.
“We started this campaign with an intention and aim to create awareness about cleaning beaches and to teach people about the importance of waste segregation,” said Ravi Shankar, CEO of Drishti Marine that curated and helped in the execution of the campaign.
Noreen van Holstine, who partly conceptualised the campaign, added, “The campaign was rolled out across the popular beaches of Baga, Miramar, Calangute, Candolim and Colva. The response has been phenomenal so far, with visitors and tourists coming forward to participate and taking back the awareness that it is the responsibility of each of us to keep our beaches clean.”
In addition to the volunteers, around 250 Drishti employees worked towards cleaning up the beach.
A workshop on creating simple musical instruments from waste was conducted by Noreen at Museum of Goa on Saturday, and these instruments were used at the junk jam session and drum circle on the beach on Sunday.
“The campaign also consisted of daily drum circles, lead by musicians from Taal Inc, followed by each participant of #TeraMeraBeach adding one piece from the waste they collected to the community art installation, that was made entirely from discarded bottles, cans, papers, cloth etc collected by the participants during the clean-up drive,” said Noreen.