Behind the News: Voices from Goa\'s Press by Various

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I held no grudge against Mascarenhas for calling me a
"chap", but deep inside me I carried the wound. Even in
Goa I would go to see him. On one such visit, I asked
him if he would provide me with an opportunity to write
for his magazine. He dismissed me summarily saying he
prefers reputed writers. I thought he would encourage a
young journalist like me. I resolved never to write for
the magazine and I have never written for it.

When I learnt the magazine was taken over by the Salgaocars,
I felt happy. Happy not because the magazine no
longer belonged to Mascarenhas, but happy because I
felt the new owners and the new editor would give
opportunities to new writers. As we now know, it has
happened. Goa Today was no longer the domain of one man
and his ego.

On another visit during summer, I was dressed in a
suit. I was to meet the then Chief Minister Dayanand Bandodkar
and later attend a wedding in the city. Since I had no
personal means of transport, for me to travel from
Bogmallo to Panaji and back twice would be difficult,
so I had worn the suit and left home early morning. As
soon as I told Mascarenhas that I was going to meet
Bandodkar, Mascarenhas's face changed colour. He
admonished me for wearing a suit to see the chief
minister, saying that journalists must be dressed
informally. I explained to Mascarenhas, but I could see
that Mascarenhas bore some hatred for the late
Bhausaheb, as the chief minister was affectionately known.

That very same day, I met some journalists, including
Michael Fernandes who, I believe, was The Indian Express
correspondent in Goa. I told them that Mascarenhas
seemed piqued at me for wearing a suit. If I remember
correctly, Fernandes said that Mascarenhas has a
personal bias against Bandodkar regarding the
withdrawal of government advertisement. He told me that
Mascarenhas and Bandodkar were once on a friendly
basis, but both had fallen apart.

I think my second adventure in getting a job in Goa
came when Erasmo de Sequeira launched his paper, Goa Monitor
. I applied for a position but never got appointed. The
paper lived for a brief time.

Some years later, my uncle told me that he has an offer
from the Chowgules to start a Konkani daily. I came to
Goa for a visit and went to see Rodrigues at his
residence in Darbandora. He and I designed the logo for Uzvadd,
though it may have been refined when the paper was
launched. Rodrigues never took up the position as he
was to be under the editorial supervision of Madhav Gadkari,
the then editor of Gomantak. Gadkari was fiercely pro-Marathi
and my uncle felt his efforts to promote Konkani journalism
would be subverted by Gadkari. To my surprise, Evagrio Jorge,
the noted freedom fighter and news reader at
All-India Radio in Panaji, was its first editor. The
paper was well received. As expected, Jorge and the
owners or probably Gadkari had a difference of opinion.
In a short time, Jorge was out and he launched his own
paper, Novem Uzvadd.

Throwing light on Uzvadd

Without the financial muscles of the Chowgules that
sustained Uzvadd, Jorge's paper suffered. I think it
was also during this time that a group started another Konkani
daily, Novem Goem. I am not sure why Uzvadd eventually
folded up.

My friend, Cyril D'Cunha, started a sports weekly
called Goal, and I was its Mumbai correspondent. I
contributed many stories till the paper went under for
reasons unknown to me. This was my direction connection
to Goa's journalism. Later on, I was offered a job at
the West Coast Times, a daily launched by the House of
Timblos. At least two senior colleagues of mine at the
Free Press Journal went to Goa to start the paper. One
of them was Y.M. Hegde and the other, P.R. Menon.

Before going to Goa and even after the paper began
publishing from Margao in South Goa, Hegde said it
would be good for me to come to Goa. I forget the year
it was launched and if I was still a freelancer at the
Free Press Journal or on its staff. By then, I was not
keen on settling down in Goa. To me, Goa was still in
the backwaters of journalism. To leave a city like
Mumbai where journalism made blood rush in one's veins,
and go to Goa, where things moved at a snail's pace,
was something I dreaded. When I wanted to come to Goa,
I was found unwanted.

After leaving Free Press Journal and joining The Hindu,
I met Raul Fernandes one day in Mumbai. He was scouting
for talent for O Heraldo, then about to be turned into
an English-language daily. I knew Fernandes, though not
as well as his brother John and his dad, Antonio
Caetano Fernandes.

The Fernandes family was close friends with my friends
in Mumbai, the Ribeiros, owners of the Goan restaurant
in Dhobitalao called Snowflake. When in Goa, my friend
and I went to see AC, as he was popularly known, at the
Casa JD Fernandes store in Panaji. And whenever John
came to Mumbai to get supplies for their store, he
would visit Snowflake where I hung out most of my time.

Raul Fernandes and I met at the Kyani Restaurant in Dhobitalao
and he offered me to come to Goa as chief reporter.
The offer was unattractive financially for me to leave
The Hindu. I was given the impression that Ervelle Menezes,
than with Indian Express in Mumbai, was joining as
editor. Fernandes was in consultation with Menezes, I
was told. At a second meeting, Fernandes informed me
that Rajan Narayan was chosen to be the editor. I was
surprised. I never had any admiration for Narayan's
journalism. I had heard some stories about his
resignation from The Mirror, a monthly publication from
the Eve's Weekly group. Even though the offer of chief
reporter was not tempting, I was not keen on working
under Narayan.

I knew Narayan on a hi-and-bye basis when I was at Free
Press Journal and he was at Onlooker, a
sister-publication from the Free Press Journal group. I
forget what position he held at the Onlooker magazine,
and whether Narayan was there when M.J. Akbar edited it
or later when M. Rahman took over.

I once covered a function at the United States
Information Services (USIS) office in Mumbai where
Narayan was present. A well-known scholar of Black
studies was visiting Mumbai from the United States.
Narayan carried with him a book by this scholar. I
found it very preposterous on Narayan's part to bring
the heavy volume to the meeting.

In fairness to Narayan, he made O Heraldo what it's
today. I also heard some allegations about his
wheeling-dealing with powers-that-be in the government.
Many journalists and some politicians told me that
Narayan deserved the violent attack on him as his
journalism was biased. No matter what his journalism
is, the attack on him was a shameful incident in the
history of Goan journalism.

I am told he's Goa's bravest journalist. Maybe true, as
I am in no position to judge that from here in Canada.
But I find his writing very weak. His editorials and
columns have lot of spelling errors and the grammar is
often flawed. His column, Stray Thoughts, is not well
composed. Just a month or so ago, someone gave me old
copies of O Heraldo. Going through his column, I found
his thoughts not very cohesive. He writes in a
disjointed way. One thing I will agree, he writes
strongly, not sparing those whom he targets. If carving
a well-written piece is his fault, then using strong
language is his forte. I form my opinion not on just
the few papers I read recently, but also from reading O
Heraldo during my visits to Goa and from those at times
posted on the Goanet email list (http://www.goanet.org).

On holiday

Just after a year's stay in Canada, I came to Goa on a
holiday. One fine day, Fulgencio Rodrigues, once the
leader of the toddy-tappers association and a candidate
for the assembly, and a fellow-villager in Bogmallo,
came to my house and told me that Umaji Chowgule wanted
to meet with me.

I was taken aback as I didn't know Umaji personally.
Rodrigues, who worked for the Chowgules, took me on his
scooter to meet him Umaji at the Chowgule offices. To
my surprise, he offered me a job as joint editor of a
sports daily the Chowgules were then planning on
launching. The other editor was to be Antonio Botelho,
a former sports writer at The Navhind Times, who I knew
well, both as writer and later as one of the
office-bearers of the Goa Football Association.

I was a landed immigrant in Canada and my first
experience in Canada was not very good. There was
recession then on and I was finding it difficult to get
a job in my field. I worked in a warehouse for
sometime, making enough money to buy a ticket to India.

The offer came with a flat in the Sant Inez locality of
Panaji and a car. I told Umaji that if I accept the
position, I would forfeit my landed immigrant status in
Canada. I asked if what would happen if the paper
failed to fly. He said he would absorb me in the public
relations department of the Chowgules. I went to Sant
Inez with one of the Chowgule officers to select a
flat. I picked one. After that I went to the Gomantak
building to meet with Narayan Athawale, editor of Gomantak
. Umaji had explained that Athawale would be the
overall in charge of the new paper.

After speaking to Athawale, I met some workers. I
noticed some tension among them regarding the launch of
a new paper. The workers felt that profits from the Gomantak
paper would be diverted to sustain the new sports
daily. In other words, the workers would get lesser
bonuses. The atmosphere in the press seemed vitiated. I
was also aware of what happened to Evagrio Jorge. I was
contemplating whether I should risk my Canadian
immigration to remain in Goa. My heart and mind was
divided, and so was my family. My dad said I should
stay back as the job prospects in Canada very dim, but
my mom said I should go back and see what the future holds.

At the same time I was engaged and in a week or two
would get married. My future wife insisted that I
forego the offer and return to Canada. I gave the whole
thing a good thought and decided to tell Umaji that I
was not interested. He had told me that if I decide to
accept the offer, I should finally meet Ramesh Chowgule
who, I think, was the managing director of the Chowgule
group. I believe the paper was never launched. To this
day, I am not sure how the Chowgules came to know about
me. My hunch is that Prashant Joshi, former official of
the Goa Cricket Association, whose family owns the
Joshi and Sons Auto Center in Vasco, told Umaji about
me. I had gone to visit Joshi in Vasco when I came to Goa.

During my next visit to Goa, I was happy to know that
one of my colleagues at Free Press Journal, Padiyar,
was editor of The Navhind Times with another former
colleague, M.M. Mudaliar, as his associate. In fact,
Mudaliar was passed over by the management after Bikram Vohra
left to go to Khaleej Times in Dubai. Mudaliar and me
had lunch one day in a Panaji restaurant and he seemed
quite distraught. Padiyar, who joined The Navhind Times
from The Times of India where he had moved from Free
Press Journal, had a brief stint as editor as he passed
away following a heart attack.

I knew the publisher of The Navhind Times, Vilas Sardesai,
well because of his involvement with soccer. Once
when I was in Goa, he, D'Cunha and I travelled in a car
he borrowed from Vohra, as his own car was unavailable,
all the way from Panaji to Margao to watch a soccer
match. I never asked Sardesai for a favour to get me a
job at The Navhind Times. I was content working in
Mumbai where journalism flourished those days and
continues to do so till today.

Grown since

When I check websites of Goan papers or when some
friends and family bring Goan papers to Canada from
their visits, I notice that Goan journalism has grown
since I saw it first-hand. It behooves well for this
field that Goa now enjoys many dailies and has
correspondents of many leading Indian papers.

The quality of reporting and editing is still not very
impressive. What is, however, impressive is that the
new breed of journalists shows lot of guts and
vitality. I once discussed the teaching of journalism
with Fr. Planton Faria, who used to run the Diocesan
Communication Centre at the Archbishop's House at
Altinho in Panaji.

He showed me the student paper and I saw some good
writing. I am not aware if the centre is still
operating. Fr. Faria was editing a Konkani paper while
also running the centre.

It has been my ambition to have a journalism college in
Goa named after Frank Moraes, one of the finest editors
in Indian journalism. There may be many who would
dispute my suggestion on the basis that Moraes didn't
do anything for Goan journalism per se, and I totally
agree. No matter he did play a direct role in Goan
journalism, but he was a Goan journalist of repute.

One may argue that during the Portuguese days there
were many Goan journalists who played crucial roles in
promoting Goan journalism. Some of these journalists,
who were also leaders, were in the forefront of Goa's
liberation struggle. Maybe so, Moraes too played a
vital background role in Goa's liberation, largely
because of his close friendship with Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru.

Whatever the case, a college of journalism, affiliated
to the Goa University, is a dream that I cherish and
hope it would be realized in my lifetime. Goa has a
privileged status in the history of the written word in
India with the publication of the first-ever book in
the country. Journalism is part of the written word
and, hence, a college that fosters the growth of
journalism would be ideal in the serene surrounding of
Goa's educational landscape. That's my thought to
ponder for those in the decision-making positions.

Chapter 3:
West Coast Times : A dream ruined

Valmiki Faleiro One of Goa's own, home-grown profilic writers between
the mid-seventies and mid-eighties, Faleiro worked his
way through other professions too, before coming back
to commit himself in writing once again, only to reveal
a style that remains as readable as ever. Luckily for
Goa, Faleiro doesn't rule out the possibility of taking
to the pen -- or should one say, the computer keyboard
-- sometime in the near future.

Summer, 1978. Whether Goa's only English daily hit
newsstands in Margao at 9 or at 11 in the morning,
mattered little. I was preparing for my final B.Com.
exams due in a few weeks and had, in any case, tired
myself of asking The Navhind Times' management to make
it a newspaper (for us in South Goa) that went with
breakfast, not brunch.

My association with The Navhind Times (NT) had begun
precisely on February 23, 1975. NT carried an article
penned jointly by D.M. Silveira and me. (Silveira was
one of my two English lecturers at Margao's Damodar College
and, with the other, B.G.Koshy, later turned to
journalism: Silveira was Editor, ONLOOKER, of Mumbai's
FPJ group and Koshy the Associate Ed. of The Current Weekly.)

Then on, the NT Editor, Dr. K.S.K. Menon, encouraged me
to write. Off and on, he would also commission me to do
Sunday features, sometimes full-page, on topics of
prevailing reader interest. Between 1975 and 1978, I
had some 45 by-lines at the NT, then a 6-pager (10
pages on Sunday.)

Sometime in between, Dr. K.S.K. asked me to join the NT
desk -- with free education at Dempo College of Commerce
and no-night-shifts baits. I ought to have grabbed the
offer. The company was great: K.P. Nair (News Ed), the
incredibly witty Balan (Chief Sub), my friend Patrick Michael
(a gifted Malayalee who, with me, but surreptitiously,
covered North Goa for The Current Weekly -- together we
had done the Siddarth Bandodkar shooting story, but who K.S.K.
ensured stayed as Proof Reader without promotion at
the NT!) Gabru and Cyril D'Cunha were at the desk and
Gurudas R. ("Kaka") Singbal, Pramod Khandeparkar and
Jovito Lopes on the field?

For reasons that will take me off this track, I
declined the offer. Promising Dr. K.S.K., however, that
I'd join the day I complete graduation -- though I
never really meant to take journalism as a career. I
had set my sights on becoming a Company Secretary after
B.Com. but while doing the correspondence course,
thought I'd work -- and earn pocket money.

The '70s were times of MRTP culture. There were
monopolies and there were restrictive trade practices,
and Commissions that could barely hold them in check.
Even though Dr. K.S.K. to my sheer amazement once
bragged that the Prime Minister's private secretary
telephoned him while he was shaving just that morning
(to compliment him on the day's "excellent" editorial),
fact was that NT rarely traveled 35 kilometres to Margao
before 8 or 9 in the morning. Times wouldn't change
and the NT stood still. It was a proud monopoly, which,
after all, had weathered challenges from the likes of
Goa Monitor (Papa Baba Sequeira-owned, Jagdish Rao
-published, Mario Cabral Sa-edited and Alfred De Tavares
-chief reported.)

Back to the summer of 1978. As our 'unholy trinity' of
Aleixo, Shekhar and me daily sat at the Govind Poy
house on Abade Faria Road, Margao, preparing for our
final B.Com. exams, I missed Kaka Singbal -- a.k.a.
Balsing, the Sunday columnist and Chief Reporter of NT
-- and Sripad P. Madkaikar, who at one time or the
other published most of Goa's dailies. Both had called
at home earlier in the day. Kaka left a note saying he
had something "interesting" for me and would I kindly
see him soon. I met him at his Patto quarters early
next morning. He said he had quit NT and joined a
newspaper that was going to be published -- from
Margao! He said the proprietor, Panduronga (Chalebab) Timblo
-- Papa to most of us -- had made a blanket offer:
whatever the NT offered me, he would offer more!

I immediately went to Navhind Bhavan. Dr. K.S.K. was
seated with Fr. Lactancio Almeida, then Editor of
Vauraddeancho Ixtt. I explained that it would help me
cope with my Company Secretary studies from the
comforts of my own home in Margao? The ex-Army man
perennially dressed in cool white almost sprang from
the chair, his neatly waxed whiskers bristling with
rage: "Are you going to that W.C. s**t Times?"

He tried a different line, "Are you going to join my
competitor and stab me in the chest?" And yet another,
"Remember I am the P.A.C. (Press Advisory Committee)
chairman for another three years -- and as long as I'm
around, I'll ensure you don't get an accreditation!!"

I was painfully aware that I was reneging on a promise,
that by joining a competitor, I'd hurt the hand that
had, in good measure, groomed me. But Company
Secretaryship was my object -- not journalism -- and I
honestly imagined that studying the course material and
sending out its Response Sheets would be better done
from home and without working on shifts, as I'd at NT.
[I was, eventually, recompensed with poetic justice. I
hadn't reckoned that joining a fledgling -- nay,
nascent -- publication as its Staff Reporter, with
added responsibility of news-gathering in South Goa
(which meant re-writing copy from mofussil
correspondents who largely hailed from a vernacular
background) would be so engrossing an affair that I
ended up sending not a single Response Sheet to the
Institute of Company Secretaries of India!]

The West Coast Times (WCT) began churning out dummies
by late-June 1978. My die was cast on June 6, 1978, by
way of acceptance of the appointment letter, personally
signed by Papa (Panduronga Timblo) himself. One of the
most promising publishing ventures in the history of
Goa's print media was about to take off?

The mid-'70s witnessed a boom in Goa's mining industry,
both in terms of productivity and profitability.
Panduronga Timblo Industrias (PTI) had evidently also
made pots of cash, particularly from its manganese
mines in Rivona, Quepem. While brother, Gurudas' Timblo
Private Limited (TPL) had during this time invested in
some far-sighted (but alas, badly managed) industrial
enterprises, including fertilizers, rubber footwear and
collapsible tubes, youngest brother, Modu's Sociedade
de Fomento Industrial (SFI) was consolidating its
strengths in mining and diversifying into hospitality.
PTI did not lag behind -- with Parshuram Paper Mills at
Chiplun, industrial gases in Bangalore and, to the
surprise of many, an English-language newspaper from Margao!

A rival to Hobson's choice NT

The last comment may be off the mark. As I later learnt
from Papa himself, the project was conceived from a
broader vision. Throughout the Konkan, from Ratnagiri district
in Maharashtra to South Canara (now Dakshin Kannada)
districts in Karnataka, no English-language daily was
available before noon or afternoon those days. While
the Mumbai dak editions of Times of India (ToI) and
Indian Express (IE) did the honours in coastal
Maharashtra, it was Bangalore's Deccan Herald in
coastal Karnataka. Goa's NT, which took only a couple
of hours less to reach Margao, could not be expected to
travel beyond its borders on mass circulation basis --
till WCT arrived, NT was in fact believed to have
pegged its circulation (to avoid re-classification to a
higher bracket, which implied higher minimum wages to
staff and workers!)

It was Papa's dream to fill this void of a morning
English-language daily for the entire Konkan, from Goa.
Hence the West Coast in the newspaper's name.
Competition to NT was only incidental. (I am not aware
of any family feuds among Goa's mining magnates at the
time and shall stand corrected if there was any such
raison d' etat. If there really were any differences
between the two families, they would be buried some
years later: under blessings of the Partagal Swamiji,
Papa's grand-daughter, Pallavi, was given in marriage
to the Dempo headman, Vasantrao's son, Srinivas -
current Chairman of the Dempo group.)

The infrastructure put into place to realize Papa's
dream matched. A modern civil construction,
meticulously designed, was put up at Davorlim, just
beyond Margao's municipal boundary. Editorial,
advertising and printing departments were housed under
one roof for optimum synch. All sections of the
newspaper's production process, from subbing to
typesetting, from proof reading to optical processing,
from plate-making to the final printing, were so
located as to achieve maximum production speed.
Attention was paid even to minor details, like sending
galley proofs to the news desk in a jiffy. Such were
the conveniences that the edition could go to bed by a
leisurely 4.30am (the print run took barely half an
hour.) Communication lines were made as reliable as
possible, given frequent power interruptions. Both PTI
and UNI ticker services were subscribed to (though only
the PTI had a carrier station in Margao to cope with
breakdowns.) A full-fledged bureau was set up in
Panjim, connected to the editorial offices in Davorlim
by teleprinter link.

The printing technology employed was said to be the
best available in India -- except in typesetting, where
for some unknown reason, Lino machines were used
instead of computers (maybe the value of lead scrap, in
place of katchra bromides that computers generated
those days, had something to do with it!) No more
block-making for photographs and illustrations; these
were optically processed directly to printing plates. A
modern web offset printing machine was brought in
(together with a Delhi-based Haryanvi operator who soon
acquired fondness for palm feni from nearby Jose's bar
and other unprintables from across the Rawanfond
railway tracks!). The machine churned out, if I
remember right, 50,000 copies/hour. Even the camera
purchased for the Staff Photographer was a
top-of-the-line German Leica, complete with an array of
lenses and filters, worth a lakh of rupees of 1978.
Krishna Kurwar managed the plant, under the
GM-cum-Publisher, Madkaikar. The result was a
refreshing, never-before-seen product on the landscape
of Goa's print media.

To match, a high-profile editorial team was put
together under the stewardship of Konkani-speaking M.G. Bailur
and his Associate, Tulu-speaking Y.M. Hegde, both
originally from South Canara. The backbone of the
newspages, the News Editor, was P.R. Menon, the old and
revered FPJ warhorse. The complement of three Chief
Subs and about a dozen Subs was picked from various
national dailies -- Goa could come up with only two
pairs of hands on the news desk. Being unfamiliar with
local affairs, this cast added onus on Kaka Singbal and
me to mark the priority of our dispatches in the
initial days!

The news-gathering team headed by Kaka (assisted by
Dharmanand Kamat in Panjim and Karamchand Furtado on
the TP link) was, of course, entirely home-bred. I
rushed college-mate Leslie St. Anne thro' a crash
course in typing to join me in Margao. In South Goa, we
had Radharao Gracias and Joey Rodrigues (both law
students then), Felicio Esteves (who went on to become
a Ministerial P.A. and co-author of the infamous Marks Scandal
subsequently scooped by me for the FPJ), John Carlos Aguiar
in Ponda, Vallabh Dessai in Quepem, Minguel Mascarenhas
in Sanguem, Kelly Furtado in Vasco, and half a dozen stringers
across South Goa. Manikrao (brother of the
award-winning ToI photographer, Prabhakar M. Shirodkar)
was our lensman, assisted by Lloyd Coutinho in Margao
and Lui Godinho in Vasco, excellent photographers all,
who provided the memorable photo inputs that shot the WCT
to instant fame.

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