"Development... [is] a constructive form of destruction." So said International Herald Tribune's Akash Kapur in his book "India Becoming", the narrative of an Indian expat returning to his native India after 20 years in the US to witness the huge transformation taking place since he left. He continues: "for everyone whose life was being regenerated in the new India, there was someone...whose life was being destroyed."
In so many ways The Andaman Islands - closer to the Thai and Burmese coast that India itself - are a microcosmic analogy for the rapid change that is happening in India. In some ways, it's also that for what is happening in the wider world. As an experience, we felt a personal sense of the way progress eventually overtakes the status quo as we sped away in our Rikshaw from a beautiful sunsets at Rahdi Nagar Beach - dubbed the best beach in Asia by TIME magazine in 2004 - before air-conditioned, 4WDs carrying wealthy Indian tourists caught us up, overtook us or even ran us off the not-even-single-carriage way road home. While we we were able to muster quickly and get a head start, the envelopment by a swarm of large horn-hitting vehicles was as inevitable as it was intimidating.
Havelock Island in The Andamans is at a crossroads perfectly exemplifying this development and so-called progress. A couple we met who had visited the island 16 years ago said they couldn't even recognize it (much as I couldn't recognize Anjuna Beach 15 years later). All the tourist infrastructure of "Village number 1" (to distinguish it from villages 3, 6, 6.5 and 7!) had arrived in that time, they said. (Most of that infrastructure is arriving - by boat or plane - through the capital, Port Blair, which is a god-forsaken, awful hellhole where progress and development have most certainly overcome any beauty or pleasantness there once was.)
The whole of the East coast - beaches 2 and 5 - are lined with beach-front bamboo hut resorts to provide the visitor with that back-to-nature retreat so craved by the stressed-out westerner. The island is a staging post for some of the most staggering diving and snorkeling adventures, but the pace of life is wonderfully slow and many appreciate how SMS messages and ATM transactions are not something to be taken for granted.
But as the Yoga-loving, scuba-diving and chilled out backpacker market begins to give way to the wealthy Indian holiday makers now discovering this sensational destination, the island is in the midst of fundamental change - again. For those jetting in from Delhi instead of London, a bamboo hut represents uncomfortable hardship, not blissful escape. For those from Mumbai rather than Sydney, an un air-conditioned Rikshaws are simply not practical for moving your extended family around the island. Consequently 4WDs begin to own the very narrow road that weaves from one village to the next, and the hinterland behind the original resorts is now in the process of hosting concrete and breeze-block, not bamboo. Now you can walk barefoot along the uninterrupted and pure white beaches from one resort to another, but gradually that walk will be blocked off by one security fence or another - we found it already was in some places.
Rahda Nagar Beach, or beach No 7, itself on the cusp of development
Change is all around as islands in different stages of development take on a faster pace in their involuntary dash towards the 21st Century. The newspapers recently reported that the authorities have had to introduce a ban on tourist busses stopping along a road that runs up the middle of the largest island - Middle Andaman - for fear that their curiosity for encounters with the hitherto untouched Jarawa tribe is putting this small group (only 350 remaining) of indigenous people in existential jeopardy.
Equally, the coral reefs in the south are in extreme danger of destruction as increasing numbers of boats and divers will come to see what is today a uniquely unspoiled habitat. Already decimated by the 2004 Tsunami and with the coral increasingly bleached from warmer waters caused by global warming, you have to think that pretty soon, as the world Tourist market descends on these peaceful and clean waters - such as those around South Button Island where we snorkeled, the outcome will only be disastrous...and irrevocable.
So when our snorkeling guide talked sadly of The Andaman Islands being the "Last Frontier" it struck a chord - and not only because this was our last stop on our Indian oddessey before heading home via Mumbai. It seems that just as India itself is going through dramatic changes as it assimilates a more capitalist, modern and materialist future - in many ways a good thing as it lifts millions out of poverty; so too do many important assets and facets fall by the wayside, never to be reclaimed. As rural gives way to urban and light industrial as the global services opportunity takes root; or as the ever-growing middle classes offload spiritual superstition and solace for consumer avarice and ambition...something is lost that can never be regained.
But the Andamans represent more than that too, standing as a last victim to the "progress" that erodes natural habitats, pollutes environment, ruins vistas and destroys the kind of beauty that is very hard to find anywhere in the world anymore.