Birth pangs at Sant Inez
Elston Soares
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Elston Soares, a veteran of the desk, has worked at the Herald, Newslink and
Gomantak Times. Since moving out of Goa, he has worked in publications in
the Gulf and Singapore.
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February 15, 1987 marked a watershed in the history of
English-language journalism in Goa. That date marked
the launch of Goa's fifth English-language daily to be
launched in the union territory-turned-state.
Fifth, that is, if one includes the now defunct West
Coast Times and Newslink, an English-language newspaper
launched by the Tarun Bharat Group, and targeted at
Goa, though like the Tarun Bharat in Marathi earlier,
it too was printed from the neighbouring city of Belgaum.
This writer spent two months with Newslink in late 1986
in Belgaum, together with Haseeb Shakoor and Derek Almeida,
bringing out the newspaper in very trying and
primitive conditions.
Strangely, the Tarun Bharat group then thought that
they could do another Tarun Bharat with Newslink, that
is, to produce a newspaper for the Goa market from
Belgaum. But with one significant difference.
We did not have the wide correspondent network of Tarun
Bharat. We were, instead, expected to translate the
stories from Marathi -- something we did rather more
successfully in Gomantak Times a few years later.
But then, at Belgaum, this was a task easier said than
done. And as anyone who has tried translating stories
from Goa's Marathi press will testify, most stories
contain enormous amount of comment and a large number
of them are un-sourced.
Our plight could therefore be well imagined. Things I
guess have become somewhat better in the last few
years; but then it was a nightmare. Trying to fill up
six broad-sheet pages with material translated from
Tarun Bharat was way too optimistic a goal, to put it
mildly. So at best you managed a couple of pages. The
rest of the paper was trusty old teleprinter copy,
courtesy UNI (United News of India) and PTI (Press
Trust of India).
And as for our own reporting resources, there was
Lionel Messias who slaved all alone in the Panaji
office. This couldn't last. So in early December 1986,
when the Gomantak Group advertised for staff, I jumped
at the opportunity and applied. Besides being a good
opportunity to return home from Belgaum -- anyway one
used to travel home every week -- the adventure of
being there as a newspaper was being born was too good
to miss.
Not that I was totally unfamiliar with the birth pangs
of newspapers -- having joined the Herald as a trainee
when it was a few months old and Newslink when it was
in a similar position. But, birth pangs or whatever,
there's nothing like competition to add a little
excitement. It shakes up established players, and all
the poaching for staff only pushes up salaries and
gives hitherto ignored journalists their day in the sun.
I too was offered more money -- more than double my
last salary drawn in the Herald -- which I had quit a
few months earlier in less than happy circumstances.
Meanwhile, just as Gomantak Times was about to be
launched, Rajan Narayan in his inimitable style
launched a broadside against the to-be-launched
newspaper. For days, he wrote about how the Maharashtrawadis
were planning take over Goa's English-language media.
Never mind that most of the to-be-launched paper's
staff were old Herald hands.
However, GT -- as the paper was later referred to --
seemed on to making great progress as we neared launch
date. For the first time in the history of Goa's
English-language media, we had newspaper designers
working on what the paper would look like. A two-man
team from what was then Bombay was paid a princely sum
of Rs 25,000 to come up with the new design.
But that was where the good news stopped. The company
which had sold the Chowgules the desk-top publishing
equipment for the new newspaper had amazingly been able
to convince the management that there was no need for
paste-up artists. So there we were, trying to put
together a newspaper without artists or computer
operators or journalists who could do screen-based page layout.
There were no dummy runs; in fact, on the night before
the first edition, I was forced to call one Herald's
former paste-up artists to come in and help produce the
paper. Today, all this may sound strange -- given the
technological innovations of the last decade -- but
then it was crazy, particularly given that the
Chowgules had a fully functioning newspaper Gomantak
and should have known better.
Then to the issue of staff recruitment, and and one of
my pet peeves.
Goan newspaper managements have always hired
journalists from outside the state -- at exorbitant
salaries -- believing them to be better than local
talent. And so was the case with GT, where my then
chief-sub colleague, a sub from the Times of India, was
paid twice as much as I was. But just because they are
imported, foreign talent isn't always good or suitable
for the job at hand. This Bombay veteran was such a
miserable creature that on launch night, with editor
Mohan Rao shouting his head off, one was forced take
charge and ensure that we got the paper to the press.
But no mention of this paper's launch can be complete
without a mention of the role Gomantak editor Narayan Athawale
played. While generally supportive of the idea of the
newspaper in the early days, including recommending the
hiring of staff whose knowledge of the language was
less than adequate, he almost knocked the paper off its
feet before it was launched.
For this the late Mr Rao was to blame; but it was an
innocent mistake. A few days before the launch, Mr Rao
asked Mr Athawale to write a piece for the new
newspaper -- it remains the only one he ever did.
And with good reason.
In it, he proceeded to say that the new newspaper would
convey the views of the Marathi Gomantak in English. It
was a ridiculous claim; but something that the new
newspaper took years to live down. This proved to be a
real gift to the paper's rivals, which they exploited
to good effect.
The early days with GT were fun, because most people
didn't give us much of a chance. Our staff resources
too were meagre. There was Pramod Khandeparker, who was
the Assistant Editor but was more of a chief reporter;
and a retired English professor M.N. Pal as news editor
-- who spent a few months with us -- and G.K. Mohan Nair,
the ToI sub.
Ex-Herald colleagues included Francis Ribeiro. And
among the trainees was my good friend Vidya Heble. But
most of the staff were raw and we stumbled along in
those early days. The first year passed with GT barely
making a dent. I believe that the paper's circulation
barely exceeded a few hundred copies. And as the second
anniversary approached, Mr Mohan Rao was preparing to
say his goodbye. He original brief was to set up the
paper and leave after two years.
This set the stage for Ashwin Tombat to take charge of
the paper. And immediately we began to see a dramatic
change in the paper's fortunes. Of course, we were
helped along by the Narvekar molestation scandal. But
to be fair, it's not the issue that matters, but how
you handle it. If we did manage to raise our
circulation it was because of our reporting. Some in
media, did take exception to the fact that we named the girl.
But I feel it was needed then, specially if you have
are up against a powerful political figure. For those
who still doubt this view, I can only point to the way
the Miramar sex scandal died down without the guilty
being brought to book. However, one is not suggesting
that the victim in sex abuse cases should be named. The
only reason I have raised this issue is to explain why
the girl was named.
Sorry for digressing; but another turning point in the
history of paper came in 1993 when we were faced with a
contempt notice from the Supreme Court. Sadly, this
proved to me that whatever a management tells you, if
you get into trouble you face it alone. In the case in
question, we were hauled up for what was taken to be a
suggestion, in a cartoon, that a Supreme Court judge
was being bribed to adjourn a hearing in a case related
to the disqualification of then chief minister Ravi Naik.
How I got involved in the matter -- even though it was
my day off -- is another matter. But the real icing on
the cake was that what the court claimed we had
suggested in the cartoon apparently was the truth.
Unknown to us then, a colleague in our sister newspaper
had apparently tried to bribe a judge. But the deal had
fallen through because the judge wanted more money than
the politician was willing to pay. The story came out
when the journalist apparently did not return all the
money that he was given by politician and claimed he
had incurred "expenses".
Ravi Naik ultimately resigned, ironically after himself
losing an appeal against his disqualification in the
Supreme Court; and I was cleared of contempt charges.
Two years later I left GT.
But the memories remain.