Only a conscious renewal of community compassion can bring harmony back to neighbourhoods
A commandment in contradiction
The commandment “Love thy neighbour” may stand as one of the most recognised moral precepts. Yet, in present-day Goa, neighbourhoods reflect a reality that contradicts this teaching. The locality of Vidhyanagar in Margao provides examples that demonstrate how neighbours have become a source of disturbance, alienation, and neglect rather than a source of compassion. Courts and legislatures have intervened to legislate filial duty, but the lived experience shows that the collapse of neighbourly trust continues to define community life.
The noise of inconsideration
On one side, a household has embraced perpetual renovation. Workers arrive to drill, grind, cut tiles, weld sheets, and install blinds and windows. These activities, though within private property, spill across boundaries by creating unbearable noise and dust. For a family caring for a paralysed father, such disturbances aggravate anxiety and disrupt fragile stability. Under Indian law, repeated disturbances of this kind fall within the scope of public nuisance under Section 268 of the Indian Penal Code and they implicate the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. Yet, in daily life, the protection of peace depends not only upon law but upon basic neighbourly decency. When that decency is absent, law becomes the last refuge.
Pride in absent children
On the other side resides an elderly couple in their seventies and eighties. Their sons work in developed countries and the parents appear to take pride in that fact. Yet pride in foreign earnings does not translate into welfare. The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 requires children to provide for the needs of their parents, but in practice such obligations are often displaced by the prestige attached to migration. Parents adorn their houses with improvements as if to prove to their visiting sons that they remain self-sufficient, while the reality is one of quiet loneliness. This illusion of care, masked by pride, demonstrates how the commandment of neighbourly love loses its weight when even filial compassion is substituted by distance and remittance.
The lonely matriarch
To the east lives a Hindu family whose patriarch recently passed away after a neurological illness. The matriarch remains in the house, though her two sons and their families live close by. Domestic discord between daughters-in-law and the mother-in-law has fractured the household, leaving the mother to cook for herself and manage her days with occasional hired assistance at night. The sons, instead of caring for her, spend their energies on waterproofing, painting, and replacing roofing sheets, giving their property the outward gloss of prosperity while their mother’s dignity fades. The irony lies in the contrast: the woman who once nurtured the family is neglected in her advanced years, even as the home is beautified for appearances. Once again, the spirit of the 2007 Act is undermined by practice, and the consequences reverberate across the neighbourhood in the form of ceaseless construction noise that burdens others.
A cooperative of nuisance
On the opposite eastern side stands a block of apartments, once owned by a nurse. Most units have since been sold to outsiders, including non-Goans. The nurse’s daughter now administers the property through a cooperative society, imposing maintenance charges that fuel continuous cycles of renovation. Scaffolding, PVC pipe replacements, sweeping that raises dust, and interior reworks for each new tenant have made the building an unending source of noise and irritation. Municipal laws on building regulations and waste control exist, but their enforcement remains minimal. The result is that what could have been a community space instead functions as a cooperative of nuisance, where neighbourly peace is sacrificed to commercial upkeep.
Generalising the Vidhyanagar condition
These portraits may appear particular, but they represent a wider Goan pattern. In many neighbourhoods, noise, dust, absentee children, and neglected parents define community dynamics. The law has tried to step in through the Senior Citizens Act, through nuisance provisions of the IPC, and through environmental regulations, but law cannot legislate compassion. Where compassion is absent, neighbourly life devolves into rivalry, irritation, and mistrust. The irony of “Love thy neighbour” thus finds its contradiction in the lived necessity of “Don’t trust your neighbours.”
Failure of neighbourly duty
What emerges from these circumstances is not simply the breach of filial responsibility but the erosion of community responsibility. Neighbours are not bound by statute to care for each other, yet civil society depends upon an ethic of consideration. The grinding machines, the scaffolding, the pride without presence, and the lonely elders show how that ethic has diminished. Instead of neighbourly love, the modern neighbourhood is shaped by property showmanship, by the absence of children abroad, and by cooperative societies that treat maintenance as a business rather than a duty.
A reflection for Goa
The conclusion is neither cynical nor alarmist. It is a reflection of how Goan society has changed under the pressures of migration, consumerism, and weakened intergenerational ties. The biblical commandment was not framed as a legal text but as a moral ethic. Its contradiction in present-day Vidhyanagar is a warning that when neighbours fail in their human duties, law alone cannot repair the damage. Only a conscious renewal of community compassion can bring harmony back to neighbourhoods. Until then, the contradiction remains: in Goa, it may be prudent to admit that one cannot always trust one’s neighbours.
