My association with the Herald is yet to complete two years, but I am glad that the Herald News Bureau has developed a team of talented, reliable, useful, sincere and tenacious correspondents. And I am grateful to have been involved in this process.
Chapter 9: A year apart… journalism and leaving home
Daryl Pereira
Daryl Pereira came to Goa as a lost young member of the widespread Goan diaspora. He promptly won many friends by his friendly ways and have-fun attitude. In turn, he not just discovered his roots more deeply (Daryl recently chose to have his wedding in Goa), but also earned for himself a profession. Besides opting for Media Studies back in the UK, he currently works for a search-engine promotion agency (or, put in plain language, an initiative that skews search-engine results, to allow you to be listed first, if you can afford to pay).
A lot has happened since my time as writer and sub-editor for The Herald's international edition. But a brief stint in the mid-90's has left an indelible mark on my psyche. Having said that, the Herald for me is largely synonymous with India, journalism and leaving home, so discussing it in isolation isn't easy. Also, there was no clearly defined plan – it was something I more or less stumbled on by chance.
It turned to be a chance encounter of which I still feel the repercussions.
I arrived in Goa from the UK early in 1995, after scrapping a potentially lucrative yet un-inviting career in accountancy, originally no more than another faceless backpacker with meagre funds hoping to enjoy the chilled hazy life of a shack-wallah. Shame I didn't check the weather forecast. The small matter of a monsoon put paid to any chances of beachside employment.
Offices filled with ledgers piled to the roofs were enough to put me off venturing into the world of Indian accountancy and, not wanting to follow the aimless road back home, I desperately cast the net out wide. An answer to an advert for a 'Person Required for English Publication' – one of the more ambiguous ads to grace the career opportunity pages – led to an interview and my first trip to the Herald offices.
Finding the office more energetic and boisterous than previous working environments I had experienced, a barrage of writing tests and interviews left me feeling like I had been through a whirlwind. The whirlwind moved quickly. That very same day I found out I was the new sub-editor for the Herald International Review, a paper intended to serve the Goan diaspora.
Well, what this role meant in reality was that I would read the articles awaiting publication, picking up the odd grammatical error, but more importantly I was the lowest common denominator litmus test – if the pages didn't stand up to my paltry knowledge of the Goan political system then (the argument goes) it would not be understood by Goans in the furthest-flung corners of the globe.
Day in day out, I would take the long dusty climb up to the top floor – at the time we were sharing office space with accounts. Not quite the close separation of duty to which I'd become accustomed. And although their elaborate entries in ledgers never became any less cryptic, it did give me the opportunity to mingle with those outside the editorial department.
During the early weeks of my tenure in May, the heat soared. Then early in June the rains broke – with a fanfare of grumbles from most of the populace for the three-day delay. Funny for me, as in the North European climes to which I was accustomed, rain pretty much randomly came and went. The ferocity of the storms also came as a shock. Days heavily punctuated with storms. The power cuts that ensued, hobbling our much needed computers, led to a greedy lunge for the last drips of juice out of the backup generator in order to crunch out a few extra words. Once that dried up, we would have little more to do than meditatively stare at the elements.
In the English political system, the summer is the silly system. It's the time for stories of twins joined at birth and how a routine trip to the hospital to have a wart removed leads to three-years incarceration. Falling over the same months, the monsoon season in Goa seems to have a similar effect. The supply of news is low, but the column-inches keep up their incessant demand. Ministers with long-shot pleas for 'raindrop tourism' (to wake up a beachside industry all but dried up over the period) is enough to make front page news.
Perhaps that is the reason that it was felt pushing me out into the midst of Goa on the hunt for fresh stories couldn't do too much harm. It was only later that I saw this as one of the perks of working in a small team (there were only three full-timers bringing out a 24-page tabloid weekly edition). Feeling like a young bird pushed from it's nest way before time I was forced out, between showers, onto the streets of Panjim, to interact with the local populace. Quite early on, I was struck by the stony faces of small-league civil servants. The UK broadcast journalist Jeremy Paxman claims the relationship between a politician and a journalist is like that between "a dog and a lamp post". I could relate.
However, a useful mentor, T helped me through my first real interview. This got off to a bad start when, after biking it through sheets of rain, we knocked on the door – only to be greeted with the merest slither of a gap with a voice behind it. I could almost smell the fear as the middle-aged housewife exclaimed 'naka, naka', as T tried to negotiate us into the flat. Her son, a bright student looking for entrance into engineering college, had come up against a wall of resistance – communal motivations were suspected.
Eventually, after agreeing to keep the article as vague as possible, she succumbed and we entered the flat. Once in, hot chai and samosas were thrust upon us as we sat on the main (and only) sofa in a clean and basic flat. Seems like hospitality begins at the sacred entrance – perhaps the reason why were kept out for so long. Antagonism and Indian snacks don't sit that comfortably together.
Well, for my first time, all seems to be going well. However, looking down as I rapidly scribble, I start to notice a puddle emerging around me on the stone floor. Early on in the rains and I haven't yet made the connection between downpours and sandals. The puddle grows and I feel like my shoes are slowly turning into the source of the Mandovi. I have little option other than to come clean. What followed was an episode with me apologising, receiving a maternal smile and a towel and a level of empathy I'm not sure could have been reached any other way. As it happened, the article created few ripples and the power of the press didn't have quite the force the lady had anticipated.
My confidence grew, and, as the rainy season drew on, I ventured out more and more.
Towards the end of August, the rains finally showed signs of letting up. However there was talk in the market place – the fish didn't return. At street level housewives were struggling to find the plump shimmering mackerals with which they normally populated their spicy yellow curries. In the areas surrounding the big resorts, blame was laid on the proliferation of hotels with their ever-growing need for the freshest produce. Out at sea, traditional fishermen blamed the trawlers. The National Institute of Oceanography, which is responsible for monitoring the seas, observed from the fence. Whatever the cause, changes were afoot on this rural coastal land – the once abundance of resources strained as it's popularity started to mushroom.
As the clouds melted away for good, shacks started to spring up like primroses in May. The hoteliers grumbled – their 'multi-cuisine' menus just weren't being read. Politicians took sides with either faction. Some framing the fight in favour of the shack-owning under-dogs, others pointing to their lack of civic responsibility with their spliced electricity wires and overflowing rubbish out of the backs of the flimsy beach side establishments.
On the backs of the tourists and travellers flocking to Goa came the stories of the parties, drug deaths, Anjuna hot-spots that managed openly flout local licences and throb on till the early hours of the morning. Crime also increased – the mugging of tourists, either on desolate stretches of beach or in their insecure dwellings, became more and more widespread. The hotels brought problems of their own. This being a time of huge growth, water was sapped up beyond the limits of the local ecology and the coastal regulation zone (the area demarcated on the beach up to where the hotels could be built) was debated and apparently ignored in many instances.
The international ramifications of a sordid paedophile ring is exposed, following the conviction of Freddy Peats, a German national involved in the abuse and traffic of Goa's under-age. As the grim facts unfold, including naive support by the Catholic church, the society looks on in repugnance, wanting to distance itself from such heinous activities. Once again, Goa's flirtation with other cultures in a bid to make the most of its picturesque rural ideal is put into question.
One of the major benefits of such a small team bringing out fortnightly publication is that we had the opportunity to experience each of the many ingredients that make up a well-rounded news magazine.
Towards Christmas, to lighten the load of the heavy political wrangling, I took to the fields. The paddy fields that is. As a Goan urban dweller, I am familiar with the white side of rice – as it appears in all its culinary simplicity and elegance on the plate. I am however completely ignorant of the involved process of getting to that stage. An 'expose' on the inner workings of the paddy harvest – the cutting, thrashing, pounding and milling – gives me the chance to wade through the paddy, chase frogs, and be generally mocked by good-tempered field workers. Not quite sure if this is in the general job descriptions of most journalism openings.
As the season starts to draw to a close, like a hungry tiger the news machine goes in search of whatever morsels are on offer. Once again the rains come and Panjim is filled with the sight of sodden journalists speeding around in reversed raincoats.
For personal reasons, it's time for me to head home.
On return, an enthusiasm for media leads into trendy multimedia and somehow I end up dumped in full-blown information technology, where I am today. As such, I'm not in the perfect position to be able to compare the practice of journalism in Goa with that of elsewhere, although the peculiarities of the working environment do stand out.
From the original office on the dusty top floor, we are eventually reshuffled into the air conditioned first floor vault. The cool air brings a much needed respite from the heat and dust, and the environment is definitely less makeshift. The room does have another feature – low hanging beams at the end and (particularly hazardously) in the middle of the room level out the worst excesses of pomposity with a short sharp shock. I'm not sure if they are part of a larger shrewd plan of management, but over the years they have cracked the head of a number of prominent Goan journalists and contributors. Exactly quite how this has affected the quality of output, I'm unsure.
And then there was the technology. Aside from the hardcore printing machines, large metal plates and dangerous chemicals lying around, the computers that sponged up our picture and prose were actually more contemporary than the ones I had left behind as a Liverpudlian accountant. As the adoption of the computer had come in here at a much later stage, the Herald machines tended to be newer, faster and bigger. There were just fewer of them. Working under such limited resources would at time inevitably lead to fractures. Although we worked on the computers feverishly in the morning to make way for the daily staff (whose strict deadline gave them precedence), as deadline approached tempers could occasionally erupt.
This thing called the Internet had been kicking around for a few years but towards the end of my tenure was finally picked up by a journalist fraternity that had viewed the Internet with scepticism and suspicion (as did many other people at the time). For us it was just a dial-up modem taking about two minutes for a standard sized email, as long as nothing happened to the fragile connection. As our publication was aimed squarely at the Goan living abroad, this was an excellent resource for finding out what the Goan diaspora was up to and how Goa was perceived on the world stage (especially important in the area of covering tourism). As an aside, it also meant that I no longer had to write all the letters to the editor. Other resources such as the Goacom website appeared, with intentions sturdy enough to keep it valid to this day (I can heartily recommend the recipes!). I think it is safe to say that the Internet has irrevocably changed the face of researching, collecting and distributing news. The availability of this service in The Herald and other Goan papers marks Goa out as one of the more fortunate areas of the developing world.
I often wondered how powerful the pen we were wielding actually was. Beyond the massage of ego of seeing a by-line in print, it was hard to work out if our columns of verbiage could actually make a positive meaningful difference. Covering the depletion of fish stocks after the rains did, to my surprise, seem to create a few ripples.
Liquor (hard and soft), was often present in the world of Goan journalism. Anecdotal evidence from the UK and US suggests that this is common throughout many other parts of the world. As with many stereotypes, the one of the hack at the bar does contain some truth. There is a quite widely held belief that alcohol gets the mind churning and the pen moving. A pint at lunchtime can help be a bit more assertive and searching when the proud owner of the new enterprise slips into pompous conceit.
There was one ritual we adhered to quite regularly – once a fortnight, after we had put the paper to bed, we took to the city to celebrate. A restaurant would inevitably mean a few pegs of rum. Then onto one of the few late night drinking establishments: a seedy corrugated bunker alive with the chatter of civil servants, cops and journalists. Indian rum formed the cohesive force – the basis for a number of nefarious deals in shady corners. Being not so familiar with the more subtle political machinations I felt largely sidelined.
I did get a glimpse of the more unsavoury effect if taken to excess – seeing the image of older journalists whose idealism had turned to advanced alcoholism. Exactly what were the causes remained unclear, but it wasn't pleasant to see.
But how politically unbiased were we allowed to be? The advertising versus editorial debate in the press is a perennial one. Over the year I was with The Herald, there were a few lapses where there would be direct influence from commercial interests to have articles in their favour. Being asked to give the owner of a prominent luxury hotel a mouthpiece through an extensive interview did give me the sense of being in the pockets of big business. However, I had the authority to go to press with quotes throwing into question the viability of luxury tourism in a land where the season lasts little over four months – slightly dampening the gushing tone of the article.
Rather than being downright manipulative, in hindsight I would describe the management style as slightly neurotic, characteristically protecting its own interests. This led to occasional grumbles, back-talk and skirmishes among the editorial team; however they say the best relationships flourish under tension. Perhaps this was the cohesion needed to keep together the tribe of English-language hacks who refer to themselves as 'ex-Herald'.
Being a Goan born and raised in the West, interested in keeping contact and learning about my more distant roots, the attempts of The Herald to reach out to the Goan across the globe was admirable, and I was honoured to be a part of it. The edition has since folded and it is a shame that the paper doesn't do more at the international level now, perhaps utilising new technologies available to streamline the whole process.
All in all, I feel my tenure at The Herald was a fruitful one. That is not to deny that the paper has its troubles, but to an extent newspapers (like politicians) are merely mirrors of the society they serve. The fact that it has been a part of the Goan social and political landscape for the last twenty years is, if nothing more, testament to its success within the community.
Chapter 10: Growing up with the Herald…
Visvas Paul D Karra
VPDK was an outspoken sub-editor at the Herald, where he also covered sports for the daily's special supplement. Subsequently, he has shifted to working at the prominent Bangalore-based daily, Deccan Herald.
After the Herald, journalism seemed to me like a dress rehearsal. Always a bridesmaid, never quite the bride.
Surviving months of introductory sessions with Francis Ribeiro, I was firmly convinced that I had a role in nation building. I started behaving my age and silently promised to skip rum the next Saturday night. And on moon-less nights, I stayed awake thinking about the burden of the Fourth Estate, lying face down on my leased estate. At the office there were daily hunting trips, as I went on poaching for angles and words from the alphabet forest.
In short, Herald was the 'journalism school' where I learnt all the elementary tricks of the trade. But what set apart this journalism school was its sense of applied practical nightmares. None wanted you to come up with a neat circle. If it got a reader's attention, rhombus would do, this I learned from the Herald.
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.