Behind the News: Voices from Goa's Press

The continuous slogging on the desk, day in and day out, soon scratched away the sheen off a 'oh-you-are a journalist' comment and introduced me to a world of words. This wordy world consisted of stories and stories, each of them carrying a life of their own, each one clamouring for attention. The more attention a story deserved, the higher in the page it appeared. The less attention the story received, down in the scale you go.

My 'studies' did not end with desk itself. I did my internship on the field as 'unofficial special stories reporter'. The love for writing prompted me to scan the paper for interesting news and do follow-up on these. This in the long run gave me the rich experience of a deskie as well as reporting, something which no journalism school would probably offer.

But I was not prepared for all this when I applied for the job of a sub-editor. Neither was I prepared for a question like 'Do you know English?', when I came for the interview. Asking a question like this to someone who has applied for a job in an English-language daily does seem to be a strange question. But the interviewer was Rajan Narayan, the editor of Goa's oldest daily. I was almost in a stupor after meeting the man whom I had admired for over a decade. But this was an interview and I stumbled out an answer. Thankfully, the interview was very short and soon Rajan introduced me to the then Deputy News Editor of Herald, Francis Ribeiro, who after initial hiccups became my friend and mentor. Francis Ribeiro's hand was in a crepe bandage when I first shook hands with him: Later on I came to know that he broke his hand in an unsuccessful attempt to jump over a bull while riding his scooter on the road to Saligao at night.

Not even in my nightmares had I ever seen myself sitting in the office of the Herald happily churning out copies or giving headlines to stories which thousands of readers would read the next day. But this happened on December 31, 1996. Since then, my innings in the Herald was full of excitement. Not even one single unnecessary off, as Francis would put it.

My tryst with the Herald began as a reader though. Those were my school days in Don Bosco, Panjim. Coming to think of it now, it does seem to be a strange coincidence that I joined Don Bosco school in 1983 as a fifth standard student, a few months before the Herald was launched as an English-language daily.

Don Bosco is such a fine school because, as one realised later in life, this was a school which awakened the latent talent in every student. Here my appetite for news (and, or course, lunch) grew day by day. Every morning, just before classes began, snippets of important news used to be read out over the school loudspeakers. One fine morning, it was announced that a newspaper has been launched in town called the Herald, and that the front-page and sports-page of this newspaper would be displayed daily on one of the ground-floor notice boards. A crowd of boys used to gather around this newspaper board during the 11 am interval, snacking on every word. I used to be part of this crowd. It became a ritual, to read the front-page and sports-page of the Herald in school.

In my higher classes, one enterprising fellow used to buy the whole newspaper and bring it to class, inevitably triggering a mad scramble for the eight pages. It was in my eighth standard, when one of the then Salesian fathers, Jude Borges, who taught moral science, brought copies of the Herald into the class and asked us to count the number of advertisements and the number of news items on each page. The verdict: There was more news than advertisements. The moral that day for us kids was: read the Herald newspaper, it enriches your knowledge because it has got more news than advertisements compared to the other leading daily. Father Jude left us behind with one moral. I felt like crying.

Meanwhile, Rajan Narayan's editorials and Stray Thoughts rose to dizzying heights, and so did my reading interest in the Herald. So finally when I met the man himself, I was in a kind of daze.

Of course, the man never ceased to amaze me.

Much water has flowed under the Mandovi bridge carrying with it the angst, dismay, despair, frustration of many people who worked with me in the Herald into the Arabian sea over my style of functioning. Call it what you want, my stars, fate, karma, foolishness, anything, but I have this knack of raising the hackles of people. This inherent nature was actually a boon for me as it was a kind of weeding out process through which I landed in the company of those who mattered most. Because, for a rookie like me, who had no formal training in journalism, getting trained or learning the nuances of journalism was of utmost importance. If I need to tweak my brothers for that, a little 'mea culpa'.

My innings in the Herald was a kaleidoscope of events both inside and outside the news-room. But, Goa being what it is, with sports and politics dominating the news-pages, I kept myself out of the politics and devoted myself to sports. Among other things, some months after I joined, the Herald launched the Sportswatch, the only sports supplement in Goa at that time. Francis Ribeiro, affectionately called Choppy, given charge to bring out the supplement every Friday, was running short of hands. So I got an opportunity to help in layout and editing of stories. This was really an exiting break for me because, being a sportsman myself, having played competitive judo, and with keen interest in football, I naturally took to Sportswatch like a fish to water.

My first big story was an interview with cricketer Arjuna Ranatunga, the then captain of the Sri Lanka team, which came to play in Goa. The highlight was not my interview with Ranatunga but the startling discoveries we made of some of the murky path in which the cricketing world travels. Aravinda de Silva asked us to speak his manager for permission to do a write up on him. To our chagrin, we realised that his manager was in Sri Lanka and this was an excuse by Aravinda de Silva. This came amidst reports of some cricketeers expecting to be paid a fee – or extract money, depending on how you see it – for an interview. The standard rate then it seems was Rs 10,000! Sunil Gavaskar too behaved oddly with us when we asked him to talk to us. This was much before the match-fixing scandal broke out.

Thanks to Choppy, even though I started by helping him out on the desk, I also got to do many stories for Sportswatch. This taught me many lessons in writing, meeting deadlines, and building up a nose for news. One incident I remember is the disbanding of the Sesa Goa football team. Somehow, Choppy got wind of this. So we went to the Sesa management, which denied plans for any such move. We ran a story to this effect in Sportswatch . By the next week, things took a dramatic turn and the news became official. The Sesa Goa football team was indeed disbanded.

On the day when the decision was announced, both Choppy and me did not even have time for lunch. We grabbed some samosas and straightaway landed at the team manager Joe Vaz's office in Miramar. Here we collided with a collage of emotions from the coach to the manager and the players all in a stupor. This was a unique experience. One which provoked us to criticise the management strongly; but journalistic ethics reined us in. It taught me not to be emotional when dealing with a profession.

It seems that Alvito D'Cunha, one of the dashing forwards for East Bengal today, was one among a group of Sesa Goa players who ditched the club midway in the Second Division league and came back to Goa from Bangalore during the players transfers period. Shorn of its cream players, the team was left high and dry without any strength, nullifying it chances of qualifying for the Big League. Peter Lima Leitao, who was the corporate manager for the team, is on record saying that if Sesa Goa had qualified for the National League, then perhaps the decision to disband the team would have been put off.

Of course, it was not all hunky dory for me on the Sportswatch desk. Neither could I boast that I had become a full-fledged writer with hardly two years of experience. When Brahmanand Shankhwalkar won the Arjuna Award, Choppy asked to me to go to Fatorda for a profile of this great football player. But I almost chickened out as I did not have the guts to meet such a famous personality like Brahmanand. Help came in the form of Ashley do Rosario, into his second innings in Herald by then, who offered to accompany me. In Fatorda, I found out that some great people like Brahmanand, who win laurels for the country and win accolades for themselves, have no airs about themselves. This Arjuna awardee was just an ordinary person who performed extraordinarily. Sheer grit, determination, hard work and humbleness were his only tools of success.

My passion for all things football sometimes landed me in trouble too.

Officially, my job at the Herald, by this time, was being part of the Goa desk. On a few occasions, the news editor and the editor discovered that I was going all the way to Fatorda, 40 Kms from Panjim, to watch the National Football League. Soon enough, I got a 'goonish absurdism' from the editor asking why action should not be taken against Mr Visvas Paul for 'subsidising' work. There were two or three points with which I was accused, one among those was that I had defied the News Editor Sergio Caldeira. I denied everything in a written reply. What they did not reckon was that I would sincerely came back from the football match, and complete my day's work, which was doing the Goa page. But seniors later did not have any qualms about accompanying Choppy and me for an important match during working hours. What's more, after coming back from the match, he even helped me complete the page!

Doing a Goa page was the dreariest thing on the desk, because, of the kind of stories that landed in from the correspondents.

Stringers used to send three or four pages of hand-written foolscape papers, which, when edited, turned out to be just single column stories. I wonder how the scene is now. In those days, there was no re-writing desk and the sub-editors had to do all the dirty work of re-writing, editing and making a page. It was a tough job but it improved one's editing skills and my patience and perseverance too. So how could one be blamed for opting to take a few hours for a harmless passion like watching a football match? I footed hefty petrol bills for this by the way, but could not claim the travelling allowance.

One's desk job also threw up some funny situations.

For one, there was the traditional rivalry between sub-editors and reporters – an unpalatable and unacknowledgeable fact to many. In the Herald, we had another kind of rivalry. This running feud was between compositors and sub-editors on the Goa desk. The intensity of this feud became more pronounced during the night shifts. It used to turn into a bitter fight complete with the usage of the choicest abuses available.

Department of Information press notes (trust the politicos and their wise words of wisdom to have a hand in any kind of fight) and hard copies sent by stringers were the cause. The compositors used to concentrate on composing advertisement, after reporting to work regularly irregular, while we sub-editors breathed down on their necks to type our stories which were our life-line to fill the page. I think that Herald was the only place which recruited an assortment of a government servant, wannabe-advocate and a shoe-shop vendor as compositors.

In short, Herald became their heart break club.

Mehboob was one of the finest composer we had, although he could not discern the difference between bail and jail. One night shift, I gave him a faxed copy from Margao bureau filed by Minoo Fernandes. It was a court case and Radharao Gracias was the advocate for a defendant. Our man, Mehboob, usually is deadpan on the keyboard but that particular day, he finished it on time. When I opened the copy, suddenly, the story seemed to be different from what I had read earlier. Wondering whether I got my story wrong, I rechecked the hard copy and found that apparently, Mehboob misread the surname of Radharao wrongly and so it read like Advocate Radharao Greasiness instead of Gracias. From that day onwards, I opened a new file called 'MTV Enjoy' and stored all the bloomers of composed copies, courtesy Mehboob.

This same guy, during the Lent season, decided to skip work on Maundy Thursday, because someone told him that Good Friday fell on Thursday that particular year. All said and done, Mehboob was a sweet guy because he would come with delicious beef kebabs for all of us during Ramzan evenings.

Talking of bloomers, readers of the Herald newspaper would have had an early morning wire trip one morning if this one hadn't been detected just in time. The edition was put to bed, and the customary good-nights were done with. At that time, there was a process known as spooling, in which Page 1 was printed on a film paper to do away with the 'hazards' of cut and paste process. The Linotype operator was an apology of a man, most of the time reeking of a combination of the local urrak or feni and ghutka. The chief sub sent the page for spooling and left. Before I signed off from the office, I just happened to go to the plate making section to see how my page was shaping up and just glanced at Page 1 which was spooled and ready for plate-making. Lo and behold, yesterday's front page was gloriously laid out on the pasting grid and ready for plate-making. Even the pasters did not realise the mistake as the advertisement for that particular day was the same size as the previous days. Our Linotype operator spooled yesterday's page and sent it for plate-making. I gave him a big dressing down but did not report it to anybody as he begged me not to do so.

Talking of the pasters, Umesh, a big bull of a guy was my 'best friend' as he always liked to trouble me by going to sleep just as I finished page 3 and brought it up for cut pasting on the grid. Somehow, our animosity made us wary of each other and we developed a mutual respect. Despite numerous complaints by the chief-subs about his behaviour, he remained non-chalant as he did not expect the powers that be to take any action on him.

I guess that this attitude for disregard towards people in power is all prevalent and all pervasive in society. It is an universal truth that any law is meant to be broken. As a corollary, frozen laws are enacted by the government only in order to freeze some people, though these laws are hardly taken out of the freezer and defrosted. A case in point is the anti-smoking and anti-spitting law decreed in Goa with much fanfare and welcomed by many quarters. One aspect which was raised by noted anti-tobacco activist Dr Sharad Vaidya, was how effectively would the anti-smoking law be enforced in the State. A valid point which I had raised with the then Chief Minister Francisco Sardinha. He said on record that it was difficult to implement. He also admitted that there are always those who want to defy the law.

Rules are there on which the government seems to suffer from selective amnesia, because they are unable to implement in the right spirit as they have no clue as to how to go about it. When the High Court gave an order banning loud music after 10 pm based on a complaint by the environmentalists, Choppy and me wrote a series of articles for Insight analysing in depth, the pros and cons.

One point that had us puzzled was from ought the sound to be measured. At its source, or from the point where the complaint was made. Obviously, the authorities could not place their sound-metres at the mouth of a 10,000 watt music speaker and say the decibel level were high. When pointed out, the Secretary of the Goa State Pollution Control Board talked greek. For that matter, we discovered that the pollution control board was not even equipped with proper sound-metres. Neither could the government come in defence of the music industry and allied activities like the night clubs which depended on music and entertainment to draw tourists to Goa.

After the much touted and much publicised millennium rave party by Mumbai tycoon Jay Wadia was banned by the High Court in December 1999, I was witness to two rave parties in January 2000, though on a smaller scale, but where the corruption by the police was displayed in its full naked glory nonetheless. At one rave party at Bamboo Forest in Anjuna, instead of stopping the party, the police arrived, collected their share and left the place as unobtrusively as they came. They were blind to the open sale of drugs and were deaf to the raves' sound pollution which carried on well past midnight into the wee hours of the morning.

Another rave party also organised near Anjuna was completely insulated against police harassment. Such was the extent of influence asserted by the organisers of this rave party that the police just turned a deaf ear to phone calls made by Choppy and me just to check how much the police is interested in enforcing the law. We do not know whether money had changed hands but when we did not get any response to the repeated phone calls we made to the nearest police station we personally went to speak to the police officer on duty – but to our horror found the police station was closed, lock stock and barrel, as deserted as a place hit by a typhoon. But our labour was not in vain. Next day, this was in February 2000, Ashley ran an exclusive report on the front page based on our first hand account. But the surprising part was the way the DySP North Goa denied everything, including our calls and visit to the police station.

My days in Herald are truly memorable. Along the way I did trample on a few toes inadvertently, but my well wishers and the learning tips they provided me are invaluable. Any memories I carry of Herald must be painted with the pictures of Choppy, Rico and Ashley, who contributed greatly to my development as a journalist. I can safely include this trio into the list of the other great people like Devika Sequeira, Pamela, Derek Almeida about whom I have heard a lot.

I guess, the journalistic calibre of the above mentioned people and their attitude of being go-getters rubbed off onto people like me. The excitement of running after news, rather than waiting for news to land in the form of press notes or government hand-outs, is a different ball-game altogether. It was a question of being there first which I liked most in Herald. During the police firing incident at Cortalim on the anti-Meta Strips agitationists, when two or three people were grievously injured, I know it was we from Herald who reached the hospital first. I fail to recollect whether it was Choppy or Ashley with whom I landed at Goa Medical College where the injured were brought.

Although the photographer had gone missing during this crucial hour, we were nevertheless armed with our dictaphones to record the first hand accounts of how the police firing started in Cortalim. We managed to elicit the names of injured, right from the horse's mouth so to speak, got reactions of the people who accompanied the injured and were back in the office in front of our computers.

Even as the day's incidents took shape in the form of a lead story for the edition, our faces were somber and anger welled up in us as we could not forget the gory images of the body parts of one injured youth. He was shot through his genitals. But we were journalists and were supposed to objective in our reports. That was Herald, getting it right the first time and all the time.

In a sentence, I stitched my cloak and bought my dagger, from Herald.

Chapter 11: In black & white… newsdesk nuggets

Derek Almeida

Derek Almeida, besides being one of Goa's finest and most aesthetically-balanced deskmen, steals time to write humour columns whenever possible. This product of Goan journalism has won the respect of his juniors by his honesty at work, his ability to stand by his subordinates, as well as his considerable if under-appreciated talent. Memorable headings like 'Sirsat elected, Tomazinho selected' (after a controversial election to the Goa Speaker's post) are credited to Derek, as every self-respecting deskman of that era in this state would recall.

When I joined the Herald in 1985, the news desk consisted of two unvarnished desks and three very uncomfortable chairs. The chief-sub's chair was distinguishable from the others because it had wheels. It also had a back-rest and seat fashioned from woven plastic which had given way due to continuous use by Anthony Fernandes alias Anton, Frederick Noronha alias Rico and sometimes Francis Rebeiro alias Choppy. I was one of those who did not have an alias.

Those were the days when the PTI and UNI machines were hardly two metres away from the news-desk and Rico had invented an ingenious way of preventing the clatter from getting to him. He used to stuff paper in his ears, because it was cheaper than cotton.

I also remember Anton completing his work before dinner on the night shift and reading a novel while waiting for galley-proofs. How nice it was to be chief-sub back then. I thought, one day when I reach that post I too would read novels. When I finally made it, the system had changed and there was no time to read novels. So I do have some regrets.

Rico, by the way, was very possessive of the TV which projected black-and-white images of the news. He never let us watch anything more that the news and, if I remember well, used to take out the `on-off' knob and stash it in his pocket till the end of the shift. He was, and still is, a work-is-worship chap. Rico was also the only man on the news-desk who could type with the speed of a steno.

We also had a thin wiry fellow named Madhu who made tea and did some odd jobs like taking edited to the composing room on the mezzanine floor and oiling the A4 paper print-outs to make them transparent. Every time he bunked work he would return the next day with a mournful look and announce that some relative had died. Five days later he would conveniently kill another member and disappear for another two days. This never stopped because he had and extended family of relatives comprising several aunts, uncles, aunts-in-law, uncles-in-law, cousins and god knows what. He never followed any pattern and killed them at random. Some of his relatives died several times. By the time he left, I am told, he had bumped off almost all the members of his family.

I can't remember if Madhu made good tea or not. To me, a cup of tea at work was a welcome luxury, especially because it was free. I say this because Herald was then paying trainee-subs Rs 400 per month. Not enough to keep body and soul together. So, when I was confirmed and my salary jumped to Rs 750, I moved into a new economic bracket of professionals who could afford to buy Maggie two-minute noodles. The Rs 750 put an extra bounce in my walk and the chin vent a notch higher, even though I still had to depend on my Dad for clothes.

The only reporter we had was Rajesh Singh who was very good at chess and devoted a great deal of his time playing Rajan Narayan, the editor. Apart from his writing skills, he was adept in getting other subs to buy him cups of tea.

It was at the Herald that I first met Elston Soares alias Paku (some years later, we met again at Newslink, the Belgaum-published English-language sister publication of Tarun Bharat). He had a huge grin, wrote with his left hand, ate with his left hand and edited copy with his left hand. In short, he was a `leftie'. He had an interesting sense of humour. I am told he coined the term `Romi-Marathi' for the language written by some correspondents.

Apart from the tea, another luxury enjoyed by sub-editors living in and around Panjim was a home drop at night in the office jeep. On one or two occasions I remember being dropped in the Patrao's black Mercedes to the Don Bosco Hostel. This luxury was withdrawn after we formed an employees union several years later.

This was also the time when I met Alexyz, the cartoonist. He came across as a very friendly person with a benign face covered with a lot of hair, mostly black; a very hearty laugh and a penchant for practical jokes. I remember him standing on St Tome street and directing all passersby to the Herald. The poor souls would enter the office with blank looks not knowing what had hit them.

Those were the days when the post office was a bigger landmark and Herald was referred to as `behind the post office'. So Alexyz once sent us a cartoon enclosed in an envelope. It said: 'To Rajan Narayan, behind the post office; From Alexyz, behind the bars.' That was Alexyz.