Growing up with the Herald...
Visvas Paul D KarraVPDK 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.
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.